Apple is rolling out iOS 11 today, and among the slew of changes introduced in the update is a new image format. On iOS 11, new photos will be saved in High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIC), and while HEIC is more space efficient than JPEG, PC users will face an issue: Windows 10 doesn’t support HEIC natively.
Thankfully, Apple did a pretty good job at smoothing out any possible incompatibility with the new image format. For example, if you connect your Apple device running on iOS 11 to your PC or laptop, it’ll offer to automatically transfer photos and videos in a compatible format. This apply to both PC and Mac users.
The real issue here, however, lies with third-party apps that backs up your photos to cloud storage. Google Photos, for one, can now back up images saved in HEIC format, but retrieving said images directly from the service to your Windows 10 machine will present an issue. Of course, you can use an online converter, though we advise users to be careful with uploading photos to a random website.
iOS 11 brings with it some notable changes and improvements, and it’s really no surprise users will be faced with some compatibility issues in the beginning. If you don’t want to face any issue at all with HEIC, you can always force iOS 11 to save images in JPEG instead. Just head to settings > camera > formats, though you’ll have to deal with bigger image file sizes.
(Source: The Verge)
