Have you stumbled upon a strange file that you still don’t know and you don’t know how to open Heic file? Or more simply, do you have photos on your iphone but can’t see them from your home computer? In fact, the Heic format is not very famous but it has been in use for a few years and if you have had to deal with iOS you will surely have used it without realizing it.
In this guide, without wasting too much on useless chatter, I will briefly explain what the Heic format is and which programs you can use to open Heic files from your home computer or from any smartphone.
Index
- How to open Heic
- What is the Heic format
- Open a Heic file from your PC
- Open a Heic file from a smartphone
How to open Heic
What is the Heic format
First of all, let’s try to better understand what the Heic format is and let’s immediately say that it is a particular form of the type of HEIF format (acronym for High Efficiency Image File Format); it is essentially a format for archiving one or more images. The Heic format has a higher compression than the more famous jpeg format and what is even more interesting allows you to store a series of shots in a single file. Apple devices use the Heic format to store both single and multi-shot photos (sequences of photos). So when on iphone take a photo, save different configuration, you will save the image in Heic format. in fact the Heic format is much better in terms of compression than the jpg but it is less popular.
Now that you know roughly what the Heic format is, let’s see how to open it on various devices. I will specifically omit Apple devices (Mac computers and iOS devices) because they natively have full support for the Heic format so using them you will not encounter any problems.
Open a Heic file from your PC
Although the Heic format is certainly less used than the jpeg format, nowadays there are many applications that allow you to open a Heic photo on the Windows platform. To begin with, you can download the Microsoft plugin from the Official store that will allow you to open Heic files as you normally do with other images, this is the most convenient and practical solution. From the plugin download page, just press the blue button with the word Get to download the plugin, the installation will be completely automatic.
And if you are looking for a free program that allows you to edit and change formats as well as open Heic files then I recommend Gimp, which from 2020 has full support of the Heic format. gimp is a photo retouching program very similar to photoshop but completely free, also available in a portable version.
To download Gimp on Windows connected to the Gimp home page and press the right button that says “Download GIMP…. directly”; in this way you will download the most updated version of this program on your PC. Once you have downloaded the program, start the installation exe file and follow the steps shown on the screen (the procedure is really fast and requires a few clicks. If you want to download the Portable version, connect to portableapps and click on the green button that says Download from Portable Apps .
Open a Heic file from a smartphone
As I had anticipated on iOS, the Heic format is fully supported (from the iOS 11 version ) and your Apple smartphone manages it completely invisibly. In the latest versions of Android the Heic format is fully supported so you will not have to perform any particular operations and you will not need third party apps but if your device is not updated then you will need an ad hoc app. In this case I recommend the completely free Luma app which not only allows you to open Heic files but also to convert it to jpeg format.
So, in conclusion, the Heic format is a format for archiving images and has a considerable compression; it is fully supported on all modern operating systems and is native to Apple operating systems. You can open a Heic file from Windows directly with paint or with a photo editing program like Gimp.
