HEIC image support in Plone

1

I have a user who has uploaded images in HEIC format to a Plone site and this Plone instance is unable to scale and show those images.

Do you know if Pillow can handle this kind of images and whether that's enough or we should do some changes in the Plone site?

2

It appears that Pillow itself cannot handle HEIC/HEIF, but a plugin can. See GitHub issue for an interesting discussion: Support for HEIF · Issue #2806 · python-pillow/Pillow · GitHub. Beware the licensing dragons and "bat-shit insane" implementation.

Alternatively for a site where we use ImageMagick, we had to add a decode delegate.

    # /etc/ImageMagick-6/delegates.xml
    # Add this line under the delegates section
    <delegate decode="heic" command="&quot;heif-convert&quot; &quot;%i&quot; &quot;%o.jpg&quot; ;/bin/mv &quot;%o.jpg&quot; &quot;%o&quot;"/>

Then we can use mogrify to convert it to JPEG.

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3

For non Safari browsers, to display them directly you need a viewer, like:

The use case is to store the original image but have the scaled down versions in other formats like jpeg? Or you want to just display the image, thus transforming it after upload in a more suitable format?

4

I would like Plone to handle this kind of images like any other image: add to Plone, scale and show it.

But these licensing and patent issues are insane.

I will manually open the heic files with GIMP, save them to JPG and upload again.

Thanks,

m.

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5

I think that in edit, Plone should handle (at least with a warning) unsupported formats in the form. Is this complex or we can find it only at scaling time?

6

Are you on a mac or on linux?

On macos > Monterey you can use this for occasional use (my usual way for single or low volumes of images):

Answer: photos - Quick and easy way to batch convert multiple HEIC to png or jpg on macOS? - Ask Different

The other answers in the topic have flaws you find there.

7

There is also a LGPL3 Licensed commandline tool libheif by Struktur AG (a Plone veteran) GitHub - strukturag/libheif: libheif is an HEIF and AVIF file format decoder and encoder. the README has also some links to python language bindings: * Python: pyheif, pillow_heif.

pillow-heif · PyPI seems to be under GPLv2, but since this is just the bindings to libheif under LGPLv3 it is not a solution to fix the license chain.

They are also the maintainers of a GIMP plugin GitHub - strukturag/heif-gimp-plugin: Plugin for GIMP to load HEIF files.

As @stevepiercy said: beyond the GPL2 there are Dragons.

Struktur AG were the authors of icoya OpenContent a commercial CMS based on Plone 1 (a not so good example how to weaken the FOSS community)

Fun fact: One of the founders of Struktur AG Niels Mache is cofounder of NextCloud

8

One more follow up, for people who use ancient systems that don't support the latest version of image conversion software, Apple decided to change the format of HEIC files in the release of iOS 18 sometime in 2024. ImageMagick 6 cannot convert HEIC or HEIF files, but ImageMagick 7 can. Here's its license, which doesn't sound bat-shit insane, but reasonable, although I am not an attorney.

Back in the day, I used IM to convert a batch of images in a folder, resizing, cropping, and doing all kinds of acrobatics with a single shell command, outputting them to specified filenames and paths. IM is pretty fast and intuitive, too.