Apple is now formatting images on the iPhone and their latest OS’s as .heic. Whatever the hell that is… Oh… Wait, from the verge…
High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIC) is a new image container format from the developers of MPEG, a popular audio and video compression standard.
It may be high efficiency in terms of storage but it is not in terms of the amount of work you and your phone have to do to be able to use the format with any image editor on the planet. Don’t bother with Adobe RAW if you don’t have CC, it just don’t work. You will have to convert them before you can use them OR buy a newer computer and iphone and version of Adobe’s suite… (cough$) – nope.
Convert heic to jpg for free here –>>
Your best bet going forward is to just change the formatting of images on your iPhone/iPad back to JPG and keep your masters in the cloud.
It is pretty easy – just go to Settings > Camera > Formats > Most Compatible. Under Formats there are two options “High Efficiency” and “Most Compatible” Which translates to “HEIC” and “JPG“.
Just fyi – I took the same photo, one with each setting and it was 2.1mb and 2.6mb respectively. Which is weird that they were so huge because i ran the photos through tinyjpg.com and it reduced the size of the unaltered photo down to 500kb. I appreciate the sentiment of saving space for folks who dont have a lot of space on their devices, but where is the benefit if it just has to be converted to jpg to be used by the rest of the world. (And its not that efficient). I got a feeling that Apple is forcing one of its proprietary technologies upon us again…