When you take a photo on your Apple iPhone or Apple iPad, the image – or images, in the case of dual cameras and live photos – saves as an HEIC file.
HEIC stands for High Efficiency Image Container. The format is an updated variant of the High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF), traditionally used by Apple across its mobile devices.
Apple uses HEIC for HEIF images. HEIF essentially saves images in higher quality than JPEG while also using less space thanks to advanced compressive technology. This space-saving file format uses High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) to compress and store images on device drives — taking up half the space of other image file formats, like JPEGs or PNGs.
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