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Forum Discussion

jannep17's avatar
jannep17
New member | Level 2
8 years ago

Why are my iPhone photos imported as .heic files when uploading them to my Dropbox account?

Why are my photos from iPhone suddenly imported as .heic files to Dropbox?  This only happened this week, say on Tuesday (July 4th). Has never happened before.  Now I cannot see these photos on t...
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  • Sanchez's avatar
    Sanchez
    8 years ago
    Hi jannep17, welcome to our forum! 

    I’ve just looked up this .heic file type, and it appears it’s something to do with iPhone’s photos encoding. Apparently, it is a new compression type that keeps file sizes small, in order to save space on your device. 

    I suggest checking your phone’s settings for this, or contacting Apple support about it. As this is an unusual file type, it is not one that can be previewed on our site currently. 

    I hope this helps.
    Have a great weekend :slight_smile:
     
  • DJ C.'s avatar
    DJ C.
    8 years ago

    Hi jannep17! My name is DJ and I'm a product manager at Dropbox. If you've updated your Dropbox iOS app to at least version 64.2.2, you will have an option to upload these new .heic photos iOS 11 introduced as .jpg. 

     

    If you select at least one .heic photo by tapping the Plus button > Upload Photos, you will see an option to "Save HEIC Photo as" you can choose upload the .heic photo(s) as JPG or HEIC. 

     

    If you use automatic camera uploads, you'll see messaging that asks you to choose how you want to save HEIC photos as through this feature. You can select JPG or HEIC.

     

    You can learn more about this in our Help Center: https://help.dropbox.com/photos-videos/ios-formats

    Hope this helps! 

marcusT's avatar
marcusT
Helpful | Level 5
8 years ago

On your iphone, go to <Camera> setting, sellect <Format> and then sellect <Most Compatible>.  The ios11 comes with <High Efficiency> set as default.

 

Dropbox should update in orther to allow user to use the new HEIF/HEVC format.  In the mean time do the above change to see your pics at Dropbox app.

  • Sanchez's avatar
    Sanchez
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
    8 years ago
    Hey everybody,
     
    Would you mind taking a minute of your time to fill out a survey sharing your experience using our Dropbox Community? You can access the survey here: http://bit.ly/2lNKIxT
     
    Thank you!
  • word4life's avatar
    word4life
    New member | Level 2
    8 years ago

    Sorry, maybe I've missed this, but I'm running ios11 beta and did not know about this option to save as MOST COMPATIBLE. I've taken a slew of photos on vacation and just shared to dropbox and many (but not all) are in HEIC format. Is there any way to convert those to jpegs so my friends can download them?? I understand that the setting should be changed going forward, but what about the ones I have? 

    • Mark's avatar
      Mark
      Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
      8 years ago
      Unfortunately word4life thats something you need to ask Apple as it is their format on their own beta. Its been a bit of shock to everybody else the new format so the only people who can really help are Apple themselves.

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