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Why are my iPhone photos imported as .heic files when uploading them to my Dropbox account?

Why are my photos from iPhone suddenly imported as .heic files to Dropbox?

This only happened this week, say on Tuesday (July 4th). Has never happened before.

Now I cannot see these photos on the desktop version of Dropbox. On the Dropbox app for iPhone, I see the files (with the ending .heic) but I cannot open them and cannot preview them.

What has happened and how do I fix this?

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Sanchez

Hi @jannep17, welcome to our forum!

I’ve just looked up this .heic file type, and it appears it’s something to do with iPhone’s photos encoding. Apparently, it is a new compression type that keeps file sizes small, in order to save space on your device.

I suggest checking your phone’s settings for this, or contacting Apple support about it. As this is an unusual file type, it is not one that can be previewed on our site currently.

I hope this helps.

Have a great weekend :slight_smile:

DJ C.

Hi jannep17! My name is DJ and I'm a product manager at Dropbox. If you've updated your Dropbox iOS app to at least version 64.2.2, you will have an option to upload these new .heic photos iOS 11 introduced as .jpg.

If you select at least one .heic photo by tapping the Plus button > Upload Photos, you will see an option to "Save HEIC Photo as" you can choose upload the .heic photo(s) as JPG or HEIC.

If you use automatic camera uploads, you'll see messaging that asks you to choose how you want to save HEIC photos as through this feature. You can select JPG or HEIC.

You can learn more about this in our Help Center: https://help.dropbox.com/photos-videos/ios-formats

Hope this helps!

All comments

Sanchez

Hi @jannep17, welcome to our forum!

I suggest checking your phone’s settings for this, or contacting Apple support about it. As this is an unusual file type, it is not one that can be previewed on our site currently.

I hope this helps.

Have a great weekend :slight_smile:

jannep17

Thanks, I cannot change this setting on my phone, so I’ll contact Apple.

websta91

I suspect this might have something to do with new photo sizes introduced in iOS 11?

Sounds like a problem for Dropbox to fix, not Apple

JSampo

This is an IOS 11 beta camera default option. Just change the setting with the camera settings to most compatible and new photos will be encoded into jpg format instead of heic.

FJJ

Has anyone found a fix for this yet? I desperately need to get access to my photos on my phone but I'm stuck with these useless .heic files on my mac that I can't open.

FJJ

This doesn't help the photos already on the phone... No way to get them in a usable format on my computer.

Mark

You need to speak to Apple about the Beta FJJ.

marcusT

On your iphone, go to <Camera> setting, sellect <Format> and then sellect <Most Compatible>. The ios11 comes with <High Efficiency> set as default.

Dropbox should update in orther to allow user to use the new HEIF/HEVC format. In the mean time do the above change to see your pics at Dropbox app.

Sanchez

Hey everybody,

Would you mind taking a minute of your time to fill out a survey sharing your experience using our Dropbox Community? You can access the survey here: http://bit.ly/2lNKIxT

Thank you!

word4life

Sorry, maybe I've missed this, but I'm running ios11 beta and did not know about this option to save as MOST COMPATIBLE. I've taken a slew of photos on vacation and just shared to dropbox and many (but not all) are in HEIC format. Is there any way to convert those to jpegs so my friends can download them?? I understand that the setting should be changed going forward, but what about the ones I have?

Mark

Unfortunately word4life thats something you need to ask Apple as it is their format on their own beta. Its been a bit of shock to everybody else the new format so the only people who can really help are Apple themselves.

DJ C.

If you select at least one .heic photo by tapping the Plus button > Upload Photos, you will see an option to "Save HEIC Photo as" you can choose upload the .heic photo(s) as JPG or HEIC.

If you use automatic camera uploads, you'll see messaging that asks you to choose how you want to save HEIC photos as through this feature. You can select JPG or HEIC.

You can learn more about this in our Help Center: https://help.dropbox.com/photos-videos/ios-formats

Hope this helps!

khoaoow

Hey guys, this is my online tool help to convert ios 11 photo in format heic to jpg. Feel free to let me know if you have any comments or feedback, thank you!
http://freetoolonline.com/heic-to-jpg.html

Morgansmith

Hi, jannep17

Since HEIC files have many advantages for iPhone users, such as it can keep HD quality with smaller size, Apple choose to save photos as this file type. If you need to open them, I would like to suggest you to convert it via free HEIC to JPG converters. Just sign in your Dropbox account on your computer, transfer the photos to hard disk. Then load them onto the free online version to convert them to JPG files directly. For the step-by-step guide, you may take a look at: how to open HEIC files in Windows free.

caroline888

I also have the same issue. To be honest, I like HEIC photos. It has better quality and save much space on my iPhone 6s. However, everything have two side. The HEIC format is also not supported by many other image viewer or apps or other OS except Apple's. Thanks to this HEIC to JPG Converter, I finally got all my HEIC phtos converted to JPEG format.