While you can view the HEIC photos without any external help on your iOS devices, the desktop platforms are yet to gain the support for it. Now that you know what HEIC is, where it is used, and why it is used, you may want to know how you can go about opening HEIC files on your Windows PCs or Macs. That should answer you what a HEIC photo is. If you want to learn more info about HEIC, you can refer to this HEIC INFO site.Īlso read: How to Transfer Videos from iPhone to Computer > How to Open a HEIC File on Windows/Mac That may sound a bit too developer thing but as a front-end user, all you need to know is HEIC is a compressed image format used on Apple devices. HEIC is based on the HEIF (High-Efficiency Image Format) standard that allows users to have multiple compressed items in a container on your machines. That results in you saving a load of memory space on your devices. Basically, where a JPEG image takes 4 MB of your phone’s memory, a HEIC image will only take about half of that. The reason Apple started to use this new file format for images is that it has a high-compression rate while retaining the original quality of the images. Starting in 2017, the company has made HEIC as the default file format for all the images that you capture on your Apple devices. Earlier, Apple used the widely popular JPEG format to let you capture and store photos on your machines. HEIC is actually a file format used by Apple for storing images on your iPhones and Macs. What is a HEIC File: Detailed Explanation Let’s check out the guide to learn more about this term coming from Apple. The guide explains what HEIC is, where it is used, why it is used, and how you can access it on your desktop machines including Windows PCs and Macs. If you are like those users who are curious to know what a HEIC file is, the following guide should be of great use to you. The term has made users wondering as to what this new thing is and how it is going to change things on your Apple devices including iPhones and Macs.

If you have been paying attention to the recent announcements from Apple, you have likely heard this term called HEIC.

What is the apple file format