HEIC

HEIC (High Efficiency Image Container) is the file format Apple uses to store photos shot with iPhone since iOS 11 in 2017. It is based on the HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) standard defined by MPEG and uses HEVC compression to achieve roughly half the file size of JPEG at equivalent quality. Patent licensing costs mean HEIC is not natively supported everywhere; Windows requires an additional codec, and many older applications cannot open the format without conversion.

File extensions	.heic, .heif
MIME type	image/heic
Developer	Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)
First released	2017
Category	Images
Open standard	No (proprietary)

What opens HEIC files

• Apple Photos / Preview (macOS 10.13+ / iOS 11+)
• Windows 10 (with HEVC codec install)
• Adobe Photoshop (CC 2018+)
• GIMP 2.10.2+ (with plugin)

Browse File Formats

Reference details for 53 file formats — extensions, MIME types, what opens each one, and how they convert.

7Z Archives ABW Documents AI Images AVIF Images AZW3 E-books BMP Images CSS Other CSV Spreadsheets DjVu E-books DOC Documents DOCX Documents EPS Images EPUB E-books FB2 E-books GIF Images GZ Archives HEIC Images HTML Documents ICO Images ISO Archives JPG Images JSON Other Keynote Presentations Markdown Documents MOBI E-books Numbers Spreadsheets ODP Presentations ODS Spreadsheets ODT Documents OTF Other Pages Documents PDF Documents PNG Images PPT Presentations PPTX Presentations PSD Images RAR Archives RAW Images RTF Documents SVG Images TAR Archives TeX / LaTeX Documents TIFF Images TSV Spreadsheets TTF Other TXT Documents WebP Images WOFF / WOFF2 Other WPD Documents XLS Spreadsheets XLSX Spreadsheets XML Documents ZIP Archives