Forum doesn't display a .HEIC image as a photo, shows it as an attachment instead

[captain_to_fire]

Browser, version and OS: Firefox 101.0.1, Windows 10 ver. 21H2

 

Steps to reproduce/what were you doing before it happened?

I uploaded a .HEIC file to the status update

 

What happened?

It showed the file as an attachment

 

What did you expect to happen?

It is supposed to be an image displayed

 

Link to a page where it happened, if applicable: 

 

Screenshots of the issue, if applicable: 

 

 

Any other relevant details:

I was able to reproduce it on Safari on the iPadOS 15.5.

 

If it's a cloudflare error, what was the ray ID from the bottom of the error page?

[mariushm]

HEIC is an image format that uses HEIF encoder, which in turn in derived from HEVC or h.265

 

To see the image in the browser, the browser would need to have an actual HEIF / HEVC decoder built in, but they'd have to pay royalties/licenses for it to the people that made the HEVC/h.265 standard

 

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format

 

[LogicalDrm]

Feature, not a bug. Its Apple-only format pretty much and forum supports the main ones (apart from SVG) only.

[da na]

TIL HEIC is a format people actually chose to use. As is said, requires a special codec. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

6 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

TIL HEIC is a format people actually chose to use. As is said, requires a special codec. 

It's less about people choosing to use them and more that iOS devices automatically use HEIC by default for pictures taken with their cameras and people not bothering to change it. You have to manually change it to JPEG by choosing "Most Compatible" in the format settings. 

 

[CT854]

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

It's less about people choosing to use them and more that iOS devices automatically use HEIC by default for pictures taken with their cameras and people not bothering to change it.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when everything was going remote, I taught a class where I suddenly had to grade a bunch of work that was turned in by students snapping a picture of paper handouts since the class had to transition so abruptly and we needed time to digitize the course materials. Long story short, the number of times I had to convert HEIC files to a standard image file format was painful since I couldn't be bothered to download the codec.

 

Probably my own fault though.

[Zodiark1593]

4 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

TIL HEIC is a format people actually chose to use. As is said, requires a special codec. 

The size reduction with similar or better image quality is quite nice, especially if I'm delivering full-res images to people over a very limited cloud drive size. JPEGs actually consume a lot of space when you're trying to preserve image quality. If Lightroom outputs it, I'd probably use HEIC alot more for space savings.

 

Though I'd really like to see AVIF start to take root and replace JPEG.

[Zodiark1593]

6 hours ago, Caroline said:

Why do Apple INSISTS so much in using non-standard things... ffs. I've encountered these files before in posts asking for help and could never open them because duh I don't have a Mac.

HEIC uses far more efficient compression for images, which is useful for devices with limited storage, and the limited free cloud storage Apple offers. I'd bet Microsoft probably gets charged per download as the format is quite propriety and patent laden (similar to H.265), and so doesn't include it by default. I like the space savings offered by HEIC, but a proper replacement for JPEG should be open source, such as AVIF.

 

For Windows, you can download the extension for Photos to allow the application to open HEIC files. You can download extensions to open various RAW formats for DSLR/Mirrorless cameras as well.

[tim0901]

3 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Though I'd really like to see AVIF start to take root and replace JPEG.

As would I, but AVIF support in browsers is still a bit hit-or-miss. Both Chrome and Firefox supposedly fully support it - although I have heard of some bugs surrounding it in both - but Safari doesn't support it at all, despite it being supported by WebKit. This is apparently because Safari offloads its image decoding to the OS, rather than handling it itself like Chrome or Firefox, but MacOS/iOS etc. don't support AV1/AVIF yet. At first glance this isn't surprising given M1/M2 don't have hardware decoders for it, but then you realise that Apple is a member of AOMedia - the alliance that designed AV1...

[Zodiark1593]

5 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

As would I, but AVIF support in browsers is still a bit hit-or-miss. Both Chrome and Firefox supposedly fully support it - although I have heard of some bugs surrounding it in both - but Safari doesn't support it at all, despite it being supported by WebKit. This is apparently because Safari offloads its image decoding to the OS, rather than handling it itself like Chrome or Firefox, but MacOS/iOS etc. don't support AV1/AVIF yet. At first glance this isn't surprising given M1/M2 don't have hardware decoders for it, but then you realise that Apple is a member of AOMedia - the alliance that designed AV1...

Lack of hardware decoders is hardly an excuse for Apple when they have those beefy CPUs that will make micemeat of them.

[mariushm]

HEIC is free for Apple because Apple can afford to pay the "one time" fee of a few million dollars to not pay royalties for every device sold with hevc / h265 playback and/or encoding. I think they're also part of the group with some patents but I'm not sure.

It's also free for them because the processor has built in hardware encoder and decoder, like regular video cards have.. so when you take a picture, they just start the hardware video encoder on the video card part of the processor and configure it to just one video frame and with parameters tuned/optimized for one image.

 

Firefox and others would have to pay to be able to decode HEVC in browser... even now Firefox can decode H.264 videos because Cisco made their H.264 decoder free (they paid a huge amount of money whatever premium tier unrestricted usage etc) because it was more profitable for them to have browsers support h264 decoding well.

 

AVIF would be open source and worthy of being a JPG replacement, but I have a feeling JPG XL will win... which is a shame. It's not a bad format, but again Microsoft got greedy and patented some compression algorithms used in JPG after the actual inventor of those algorithms expressed publicly that he wanted those to be free for all, public domain basically.

 

[LAwLz]

On 6/14/2022 at 2:02 PM, captain_to_fire said:

What did you expect to happen?

It is supposed to be an image displayed

There are actually two issues here.

1) The forum does not treat .heic files as image files. Probably because Invision Community isn't aware of .heic as a format.

2) No browser, not even Safari, supports .heic files. So even if the forum properly identified them as images, they still wouldn't display properly.

 

 

The solution would be to write a polyfill that implements heic decoding in javascript. The issue with that is that:

1) The libraries I have seen to do this are quite heavy. For example the one written by Nokia seems to be around 700KB. 700KB does not sound like a lot to people used to download 100GB games, but you have to remember that this entire page consist of 2,25MB of CSS and Javascript. Implementing support for heic would make the website ~30% larger, JS wise.

 

2) HEVC, which heic is based on, is a licensing nightmare. It's simply best for companies to stay away from it as much as possible so that they don't end up getting sued because they missed paying some fee for supporting it.

 

 

 

On 6/14/2022 at 6:58 PM, LogicalDrm said:

Feature, not a bug. Its Apple-only format pretty much and forum supports the main ones (apart from SVG) only.

It's not really an "Apple-only" format. It's just that Apple is essentially the only big player that has chosen to support it and enable it by default. Others can use it too, but because of the licensing mess that surrounds it barely anyone dares.

Several Android phones, including those from Samsung, has implemented it too. It's just that it's off by default.

[LogicalDrm]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It's not really an "Apple-only" format. It's just that Apple is essentially the only big player that has chosen to support it and enable it by default. Others can use it too, but because of the licensing mess that surrounds it barely anyone dares.

Several Android phones, including those from Samsung, has implemented it too. It's just that it's off by default.

I see you missed the "pretty much" part. But thanks for expanding "pretty much" to whole paragraph, I guess.

[LAwLz]

25 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

I see you missed the "pretty much" part. But thanks for expanding "pretty much" to whole paragraph, I guess.

Sorry, I did miss the "pretty much" part.