Like many of you I use an iPhone. Apple phones just gave me less headaches than the Android alternatives… that is, until Apple decided to introduce a new proprietary format for storing photos with their iOS11 update: the HEIC file format. It is feature packed, but troublesome.

At first, everything seemed to work as before, the phone would just convert the files to a standard format whenever I connected it. More recently, though, it has been hit or miss, and I often end up with HEIC files on my computer that I cannot work with.

Reading comments online, it became clear I was not the only one having issues with HEIC. The new format is causing problems for many people, and the usual response from tech support is to make sure all the software is up to date, reboot, reset settings, blah blah blah. Rinse lather repeat.

Since this seems to be a common issue, I thought I would share some of the workarounds I have discovered as well as the tools I use to deal with issues. Yes, you could just go out and install an expensive application like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop that has most of these issues covered, but I am a sucker for free and low-cost alternatives. I hope this is informative.

Rotating Images

One of the painful issues is that iPhones do not do a good job of knowing which side it up. If you take a landscape photo, but it’s sideways, your iPhone will make a best guess, but it isn’t always the way you intended. This problem becomes apparent when you transfer a large folder of photos, even when it successfully converts them all from their proprietary HEIC format to a more standard one.

Now you could open each photo in your photo editor and rotate it, but that takes a long time. What is even more irritating is that some programs will rotate the image on the screen, but then save it un-rotated back to the hard drive. The built-in Windows image viewer has that nasty habit, and it has to do with the information in the file itself (you can read more details about that here).

Wouldn’t it be better to just rotate it right there in the file manager? Fortunately, Windows 10 has this feature built in. Just right-click on the photo or a group of photos and the pop-up menu will allow you to rotate images 90 degrees at a time. This will also update the information in the file.

If you are still using an older version of Windows, you can install the app that I used before I updated all our systems to Windows 10: JPEG Autorotate. It does exactly the same thing that is now built-into Windows 10.

Dealing with unconverted HEIC files

The conversion of HEIC files, when transferring them to a Windows computer, is supposed to happen automatically. The problem is that it often skips a few files. Another problem is that the conversion process slows down the transfer of large folders significantly. I am guessing that part of the processing is done with the phone’s tiny CPU or that it is bogged down in the Lightening connection somewhere.

To deal with these issues, I prefer to handle the conversion with my PC. To do that I use a simple tool with a weird name: CopyTrans HEIC For Windows. Obviously, the marketing department was not involved in that naming decision, but it is free, so I am not complaining. What is also nice it that it is just a tiny plug-in, so once it is installed, you forget it’s there until you need it.

Just right-click on the HEIC files, select Convert to JPEG with CopyTrans and it creates a copy of the file in the same folder in the correct format. No extra features or bloatware to slow you down.

Converting image sizes in bulk

Apple likes to think of their phones as competing with high-end DSLR cameras. While the phones do have impressive cameras and these have improved with each generation, Tim Cook may be a bit over-optimistic about that. That said, they are packing a whole lot of detail into photos these days and this makes them very large.

When they are transferred to the computer, they are still just as large. An average photo can be 3024x4032 pixels or even much larger. That is wonderful for quality, but what if you need a smaller version for your newsletter or Instagram post?

You could easily open the file in your favorite image editor, resize it and move onto the next one. Obviously, if you have hundreds of photos this process will get tedious very fast. Wouldn’t it be better if you could resize a whole set of photos at once?

For that I use a separate application. There are many such applications, but I have been using FastStone Photo Resizer – again, not a fantastic name, but it is also free and has many useful features.

It is not a right-click-and-done application, but I like the flexibility of being able to pick specific files, what destination folder to send them to, and configure settings. When you have everything selected, click convert, and it starts making copies of the files in the new format.

What is particularly useful is the ability to set size limits, so for example if you need all the photos to be a specific size for Facebook, it will do that. It can also crop them, change the colors, add watermarks, and add borders if you need that. It will also convert to other popular image formats such as BMP and GIF – unfortunately, it does not support HEIC (yet?).

Perhaps the most useful feature is the ability to save those settings in a separate file so you can apply the same settings to another folder later. Basically, it remembers this, so you don’t need to reset everything. Because much of my photo work is extremely repetitive, I have this feature too many times to remember.

Conclusion

These were tools specifically to deal with Apple’s proprietary format issues that I had. Of course, there are many other tools available for manipulating images, but most of them are not free or they bug you with ads and the need to upgrade. The first two above, JPEG Autorotate and CopyTrans HEIC For Windows, are literally just tiny plug-ins. They stay out of the way until you actually need them.

The third, FastStone Photo Resizer, is a real workhorse for me. It has many powerful features, and it saves me a ton of time. I work on several computers during my regular workday, and I only have Adobe graphics software on one of them. When I am not using that computer, it is a real benefit to have free, efficient tools available when I need them.

Do you have your own favorite photo tools as well? If so, let me know and I will check them out and perhaps share them in a future post. In the end, it is all about community and learning from each other…