High Efficiency Image File Format
image file format
High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is a digital container format for storing individual digital images and image sequences. The standard covers multimedia files that can also include other media streams, such as timed text, audio and video.
HEIF can store images encoded with multiple coding formats, for example both SDR and HDR images. HEVC is an image and video encoding format and the default image codec used with HEIF. HEIF files containing HEVC-encoded images are also known as HEIC files and are mandated to use the .heic filename extension or .heics as stated in the standard. Such files require less storage space than the equivalent-quality JPEG files of the same images.
HEIF files are a special case of the ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF, ISO/IEC 14496-12), first defined in 2001 as a shared part of MP4 and JPEG 2000. Introduced in 2015, it was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and is defined as Part 12 within the MPEG-H media suite (ISO/IEC 23008-12).
History
The requirements and main use cases of HEIF were defined in 2013.
The technical development of the specification took about one and a half years and was finalized in the middle of 2015.
Apple was the first major adopter of the format in 2017 with the introduction of iOS 11 using the HEIC variant.
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This entry incorporates text from “High Efficiency Image File Format” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.