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Photos being sent as HEIC in Messages

I

iAdamator

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 10, 2013
698
172
South San Francisco, CA
Hey all.
Found a trouble issue tonight that near as I can tell, can’t be turned off and could be a big issue for me going forward.
We don’t use HEIC or equivalent at all. We are still fine with legacy JPEG or whatever you wanna call it. I have been on the iOS 14 beta since the beginning (now on the final version) and my wife downloaded 14 when it came out officially.

Today I noticed whenever we send each other photos in messsges, they are sending as HEIC even though they were taken as JPEGS originally (and if I check the photo on the source device it’s indeed a jpeg.)

There seems to be no way to defeat this behavior. Has anyone else experimented this and possibly know a fix?
 
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They are being taken from the phone they are being sent from. I actually tried to send photos taken from my phone to her and vice versa. In both cases they are taken and saved as jpegs but get converted to HEIC when sending through iMessage. (If I send them via AirDrop they remain JPEGS).
 
Your post actually tipped me off to what I thought was a bug. I posted about it in the iOS 14 bugs thread:

rsmith83 said:
Found a bug. I sent a friend an animated gif from my camera roll via iMessage. In the iMessage window it’s animated, but when he opens it full-screen and when he saves it to his camera roll it’s not animated anymore. In my iMessage it’s animated in the chat AND when I press to open it full screen.

As a test I had him send one back and the same thing happens — on his side it’s animated everywhere, on my side it’s animated in the chat but not in fullscreen or when saved to the camera roll.

I thought maybe iMessage was compressing the gif and breaking the animation but neither of us have the low quality image mode enabled for iMessage.
Click to expand...

After reading your post, I went and checked — gifs sent to me are being converted to .HEICS files. I hope this isn’t permanent going forward, or there’s a way to opt out.
 
Is anyone else having this issue. Really bugging me and I don’t know if it’s a bug or what. I have my phone set to most compatible everywhere I can set it. I don’t want to sending photos through iMessage using HEIC.
 
I am not on the beta - but what does the "low quality image mode" setting in the messages app do to this? I mean by turning it on? I never played with that setting (it's off by default I think) so don't know how low quality looks like in real life ...
 
Under Settings, Camera, Format. Choose “Most Compatible”. Most Compatible will always use JPEG.
 
iAdamator said:
Mine is and always has been set to most compatible and it still sends photos through iMessage as HEIC.
Click to expand...

Told my sister the other day to check her settings, I saw them myself, was set to most compatible but still was sending some images as HEIC
 
This is a problem with Messages. I changed all the settings on my iPhone to make sure it was saving as JPG but I kept getting HEIC when I would send them to my computer using Messages. I thought it was my iPhone but when I did an Airdrop with the same images, boom, they were all sent as JPGs. So, the problem is not with the phone but for some reason, unknown to us all the Apple geniuses figured that image files sent via Messages should be in some little used format like HEIC. Ridiculous. There should be an option to turn it off. But really, why does anyone want a photo sent with an HEIC format, really? It's unusable in most places other than an iPhone.
 
HEIC is becoming more accepted. I just purchased a new R6 camera and it has the option to save photos as HEIF (a non -Apple way of saying HEIC). This newer file format is intended to be a better way to save your pictures, making your images smaller in terms of data while retaining high quality, but if it is not accepted for the way in which you intend to use it that is an issue.

I just tested my phone and selected : Settings>Photo>Transfer to MAC or PC>Automatic.

I took a photo and sent it to my Mac and it sent as a jpg.

I am not sure if everyone will have the same result, but I thought it might be worth a try until the HEIC becomes more accepted.
 
I think you need to do both things mentioned:
Settings
Camera>formats>most compatible
Photos <transfer to mac or PC Automatic

Mine definitely send as jpeg.
 
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Signed up for these forums just so I could answer this since I was trying to figure this out today. Upgraded from iOS 13 to 15.2 today and my iPhone 7 was doing this exact thing. Had it set to "most compatible" and "transfer automatic" as suggested above. Changed the setting for sending pics via iMessage to "low quality image mode." The pics were being taken as JPG, airdropped as JPG, but iMessage was turning them into HEIC. Then I got my new iPhone13 Pro. Same operating system (15.2). No settings were changed (restored old phone backup on new phone). Pics send in iMessage as JPG now from new phone as they should. The problem seemed to be with the old phone model, not the settings?
 
wakeupwriting said:
Signed up for these forums just so I could answer this since I was trying to figure this out today. Upgraded from iOS 13 to 15.2 today and my iPhone 7 was doing this exact thing. Had it set to "most compatible" and "transfer automatic" as suggested above. Changed the setting for sending pics via iMessage to "low quality image mode." The pics were being taken as JPG, airdropped as JPG, but iMessage was turning them into HEIC. Then I got my new iPhone13 Pro. Same operating system (15.2). No settings were changed (restored old phone backup on new phone). Pics send in iMessage as JPG now from new phone as they should. The problem seemed to be with the old phone model, not the settings?
Click to expand...
I just got the 13 and I'm still having the problem. Very annoying.
 
I too have this exact issue. I set up an appt at the Genius Bar but it seems like it would be a waste of time? Seems like a bug? Or maybe I now have a reason to upgrade?
 
I Text photos every day for my job. If you are using T-mobile it is the culprit. After many emails to t-mobile, they said they can't change it it happens when the photos pass through the t-mobile server
 
PhotographerShawn said:
I Text photos every day for my job. If you are using T-mobile it is the culprit. After many emails to t-mobile, they said they can't change it it happens when the photos pass through the t-mobile server
Click to expand...
It's not just T-Mobile. It's AT&T and Verizion and everyone else because it's not a carrier issue. I believe the problem is, is that the HEIC file is smaller in size and just as good or better than a JPG. This facilitates faster transfers and high quality. That makes sense but Apple should still make available the option not to send by HEIC.
 
I've been having this problem between my wife and I since she upgraded to IOS 16.x. I'm still on 15.x, but now every time she sends me a photo, even though her camera and settings are set to never use HEIF/HEIC/HEVC, I still receive HEIF photos. (Photos - Keep Originals, Camera Formats - Most Compatible, and Messages - Low Quality OFF). Today I decided to look into it, and found this forum/string.

I suspected that Apple had changed something in the new OS that forces the phone to send all images - even when taken in JPG format - to HEIF images. (To check which you're receiving, just flick up with your thumb on the downloaded image, and you'll see whether it's JPG or HEIF right next to where it lists the phone it was taken by.) Using this method, I confirmed my suspicions by sending photos via messages. (Airdrop is unaffected.)

Now here's the solution - iPhones using the new IOS's will automatically convert to HEIF, regardless of your settings IF YOU ARE USING iMessage. If you turn that off and use SMS, you will get the JPG image (if all other settings are set to save and transfer JPG images).

So, if you don't want to get (or send) HEIF messages, you will have to either turn iMessage off ON THE SENDING PHONE, or use Air Drop. Hopefully, Apple will give use some way to prevent the automatic conversion in the future, but for now, this is the only workaround I've found.
 
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