Trouble opening heic image format on Fedora 36

Ask Fedora
1

Hi there,

Just wondering if anyone has any experience opening .heic images on Fedora?

I have tried opening with

  • Shotwell
  • Gnome Image Viewer
  • Darktable
  • Gpicview

None seem to work.

2

Have you tried installing libheif from rpmfusion?

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3

no i havnt actually thanks, is that a commandline program?

4

It is a library. In theory it should allow some applications to read the HEIC file format.

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5

it worked yes ! thanks a lot @dalto I spent hours on this…I still cant open it in those apps but after some research I found the best program is gpicview here from the fedora rpm repos

Any idea on how to get those file types running on the native Gnome image viewer or shotwell?

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6

I think you can get support in gimp with gimp-heif-plugin

Some applications may have been explicitly built without support for HEIC so you may need builds of those applications with support.

This is where fedora’s policy on patent-encumbered technology can get in the way of usability sometimes.

Have you tried the versions of shotwell and gnome image viewer from flathub to see if they support HEIC?

7

I see yes now I understand, so HEIC would be a proprietary technology I would presume apple patented .

I am running the rpm repo the shotwell. I wouldnt think the flathub version would run different formats to the rpm version but I could be wrong. I shall try to reach out to shotwell and find supported formats. I am just looking for a viewer and GIMP is more of an editor. I will try the flathub version as to your suggestion.

8

HEIF is a container standard developed by MPEG.

My understanding is that HEIC is used to indicate that an HEVC encoded payload is in the HEIF container.

I don’t think it is actually Apple proprietary.

An application in a flatpak could have more options than the Fedora repo version if it was built differently.

However, I did a little digging into this and, in this case, it looks like shotwell itself doesn’t support HEIC/HEIF.

On the other hand, the Gnome Image Viewer(eog), does support HEIC. Installing libheif should be all you need there.

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9

yes your right! its working now. Thanks so much this is super helpful.

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10

For qt apps, you might need to install the “qt-heif-image-plugin” package

libheif comes as a gdk pixbuf plugin, so you are unlikely to need to rebuild if your application support gdk-pixbuf infrastructure.

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