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Apple's tricky iOS 11 photo tech gets a helping hand

What the heck is HEIC? It's a whiz at compressing iPhone photos, but it brings some complications. New tools can help.

BY
STEPHEN SHANKLAND
OCTOBER 6, 2017 5:00 AM PDT
Apple's new phone software means your photos take up half the space they used to, and that's great. But it also can bring some complications.

Good news: New tools are emerging to help you avoid the hassles -- and to take better advantage of the change.

The new photo compression technology comes with the HEIC image format Apple built into iOS 11, the iPhone and iPad software that arrived in September. HEIC is a version of technology called HEIF -- High Efficiency Image Format -- that needs less storage space than the decades-old JPEG format. It throws other photography advancements into the bargain, too, to help with things like Apple's portrait mode.

The Half app lets you convert your iPhone's JPEGs into smaller HEIC files, then delete the JPEGs.
The Half app lets you convert your iPhone's JPEGs into smaller HEIC files, then delete the JPEGs.
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
Apple was careful to add safeguards that prevent HEIC compatibility problems and to warn app developers to take similar precautions. For the most part, HEIC images are in effect an internal format that gets converted into JPEG when it's time to post a photo to Facebook or email it to your cousin.

The trouble comes when HEIC images leak out of their protective Apple confines, as, for example, when you're experimenting with the format. You can't display an HEIC image on incompatible devices like Windows laptops, Android phones or Macs that don't run the latest MacOS software. It's tough moving beyond file formats as entrenched and useful as JPEG -- but that's where the new utilities come into play.

HEIF and HEIC exemplify the pitfalls of progress in the computing industry. You often can't benefit from shiny new tech until it's widely adopted -- think of owning the first fax machine or a Mac with USB-C ports that don't work with old peripherals. But technology companies are scared to embrace a new technology until they're convinced wide adoption will happen.

That kind of chicken-and-egg problem has hurt other image standards, like Microsoft's JPEG XR and Google's WebP.

Smoothing the way
Happily, there are tools that make HEIC's arrival easier to manage, whether that's avoiding its pains or embracing its benefits.

Free online tools let you convert HEIC images into JPEG if you're stuck with one you can't handle. Vietnamese developer Tran Dang Khoa added an HEIC converter alongside many other conversion tools. And Beamr, maker of the JPEGmini software for optimizing photo and video file sizes, added its own online HEIC-to-JPEG converter that can handle up to 30 photos at a time. If you want to convert HEIC photos on your Windows or Mac PC, the free iMazing app can help you there.

These cropped-in views of a larger image show how HEIF, left, offers richer colors and fewer speckly artifacts near high-contrast borders compared to a JPEG of about the same size.
Enlarge Image
These cropped-in views of a larger image show how HEIF, left, offers richer colors and fewer speckly artifacts near high-contrast borders compared to a JPEG of about the same size.
Nokia
But what if you want to go the other way, shrinking your JPEGs into HEIC photos? For that, a $3 iOS app called Half for iOS devices can help. Half also sells a $5 version for Macs. The unrelated HEIF Utility gives Windows users a conversion option, too.

With Half, you tell the app which photos to shrink and it'll tell you how much smaller the HEIC version is and ask whether you want to delete the original JPEG. A batch mode to convert photos en masse is on the way, said developer Christina Statescu, as is a tool to shrink videos into HEIC's close relative, HEVC.

File-sync fixes
The obvious way HEIC photos could leak out is with file-sync apps like Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. Fortunately, the companies behind those tools have you covered.

Dropbox can automatically ingest your photos, but on iOS by default it converts HEIC files to JPEG. If you want to keep the HEIC images, open the Dropbox app, tap the "recents" tab at the bottom left, tap the settings gear icon on the upper right, tap "camera uploads" and change "save HEIC photos" to HEIC.

iMazing's converter can help if you're stuck with an HEIC image you need to change to JPEG.
iMazing's converter can help if you're stuck with an HEIC image you need to change to JPEG.
iMazing
Microsoft OneDrive also converts to JPEG. "This puts a user's photos in the most compatible format and will allow them to view their photos on OneDrive mobile apps, OneDrive.com, and in Windows 10," Microsoft said in a statement. If you don't like it, you can disable automatic conversion by opening settings, tapping on "advanced," then turning off the "Upload Most Compatible" feature.

The PhotoSync app, which synchronizes photos across your devices and photo-sharing services like Flickr and 500px, also converts HEIC into JPEG.

Google Drive leaves HEIC files as HEIC, but the app now can view them on iOS and Android and through the drive.google.com website.

Apple settings
If you're running iOS 10 or earlier or have an older iPhone, you won't get an option to save HEIC images in the first place. But if you're using a newer phone, you can enable it through the iOS settings app. Scroll down to "Camera," tap "Formats" and pick "most compatible" for JPEG and "high efficiency" for HEIC.

Apple Photos also can be configured to convert HEIC into JPEGs. Tap "Photos" in the iOS settings app, find the "Transfer to Mac or PC" section, then choose "automatic."

Lightroom, the Adobe Systems software for cataloging and editing photos, now converts HEIC images into JPEGs when you import them. That's an important move since you can now run Lightroom on your phone and synchronize your library across phones, tablets, PCs and the web.

But what about supporting HEIC natively in Lightroom to benefit from the smaller files? Adobe isn't yet ready to say what it'll do. "We need to support workflows customers actually use. It's hard to say how this format will evolve," said Josh Haftel, who oversees Adobe's mobile Lightroom apps. "It's not a small feat to support it across a wide range of different platforms."

HEIF is in limbo right now. Apple's endorsement is a huge boost to its future, but it's not enough to guarantee success. Without built-in support from Windows, Android, and Adobe's widely used photo software, it looks like we'll have a healthy demand for HEIC conversion tools for years to come.

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Rebuilding Your Website? Design Tips and SEO Savers

Building a new website You’ve looked around at your competitors and their shiny new websites make yours look a bit dated. Maybe it’s a bit cluttered, doesn’t work well on mobile devices, or just needs more features. All perfectly good reasons to speak to a graphic designer/web developer about an upgrade.

But wait. Just like your business, your existing website has earned an online reputation, or ‘ranking’ over time. And just like the years that you have spent building your business, your online presence is just as hard won, yet can also be lost or damaged, when launching a new website. It can take months, or even years, to regain lost ground.

So here’s a collection of design and SEO considerations for website upgrades:

Keep the Homepage simple – not easy to do, especially when you have alot to say, or products to sell. Most of your visitors will arrive at the Homepage; you want to stimulate visitors without bombarding them with too many messages. Some of the biggest names with thousands of products do this very successfully – check out John Lewis for an inspirational example.
You still need text on the Homepage – unless you are in the John Lewis league, you will need to say precisely who you are and what you do in at least 250 characters or so.
Phone number, location and opening hours – This information needs to be in text rather than as an image, so that search engines can index and serve it according to the approximate location from where a search was made. With the huge take-up of mobile browsing, this is essential. An interactive map helps too, easily sourced from Google Maps.
Redirect all high traffic pages – Google likes busy pages, and ranks them accordingly. Assuming you are keeping the same domain name (eg mybusineesswebsite.co.uk), redirect your busiest pages to their new versions (unless the url is the same). In other words, you are saying to search engines ‘for this, see this, it’s the same thing, just in a different place.’ Don’t just redirect multiple pages to the homepage, as Google et al take a dim view of that indeed. If you are contemplating a domain name change, see my note at the bottom of this article.
Site navigation and architecture – when someone arrives at your site, they want to find what they want – quickly. Like humans, search engines don’t like ploughing through six navigation levels to get to specific information. Brief your designer that you’d really like visitors to get anywhere from the homepage in three clicks maximum.
Get a prominent Search box above the fold – if people just want to find what they want, they can use this. Make sure it works. Get to know where to find out what people searched for within your Analytics. Results from your search box can be catalysts for new business opportunities, seriously.
Make sure your content is unique and written for humans, not search engines. Duplicate or plagiarized content from other online sources is a no-no. Be assured that Google’s algorithms will spot this and your site could be downgraded as a result, however much you have paid for your shiny new website. Transfer unique content, especially expert articles and blog posts from the old site, as it all counts.
Give every page a purpose – the more specific the content on a page the more likely it is to be found in its own right as a landing page. The more landing pages you have the better your chances of attracting visitors. Ensure that each page is correctly labelled with specific Title and Description tags and that the relevant keywords are included in the page copy (but don’t overdo it, ‘keyword stuffing’ is bad, bad, bad).
Get a call to action on every page. What action do you want your visitors to take? Give them every opportunity to sign up for information, download a brochure, pick up the phone or make a purchase, by ensuring that every page has an obvious place to go for the next step.
Tag your images correctly – search engines can’t see images, so they rely on the text descriptions to categorize them. Precisely describing an image in the ‘Alt’ tag text is worth the effort, I promise you, not least because images in Google’s image search results carry a link to the page source.
Size images correctly. Images for the web need to be at lower resolution than print for fast page loading times, especially on mobile networks. Google also takes account of site speed within its ranking algorithm. Image resolution should be 72dots per inch; an average file size of around 100kb for all but the largest images is a good benchmark.
Have a custom ‘404’ page. There will always be times when a page is not found. They could come from links, old search engine results, or mis-typing of a url by the user. Don’t lose that visitor with a dull and unhelpful ‘Error 404, page not found’ message. After all, usually they haven’t done anything wrong and have followed a link that was interesting to them.
Build your Audience. Invite email signups, with a simple, strong benefit, from an obvious position. A small incentive can achieve surprising results. It is a fact that only a small percentage of visitors will take your desired action on their first visit, so encouraging them to come back increases your chances of them doing what you want, sooner.
Include genuine current trust signals and social interactions. There are a huge variety of trust signals that can be employed; business testimonials, trade associations, subscriptions to codes of practice, payment security, customer care charters etc all help to instill confidence, particularly in new visitors. Social interactions and blog posts show that there are real people behind your virtual shop window.

Changing Domain Name

Think carefully about changing your domain name. Use your Analytics data to look for what your customers call you. From your Google Analytics account, go to Traffic Sources>Search>Organic to see what people put into Google to arrive at your site. Do most visitors abbreviate your business name, or find you through a brand you sell? There might be an opportunity to capitalize on that, or avoid inappropriate re-branding.

If you are sure about changing your domain name, then it will be worth your while taking a look at Ben Wood’s detailed article on Switching Domains.