For W10, you install an app to get the codec, then you’re done. It’s built in on W11. Same as HEVC video which is used very commonly in piracy. Are pirates out to make it “purposefully painful” or are they just using modern codecs? Android also can save to HEIC or AVIF.

Yea ... no, sorry to say but this one's on Microsoft. I get it, hurr durr Apple expensive and elitist, but they know where to put up their walled garden and where not to. For example they used to have their own video container .mov but they're way past forcing something like that onto iPhone users. And even back then, the actual codec they committed themselves to in those days was H.264, a standard that's open to adoption by anybody. You can easily turn an old .mov into an .mp4 or .mkv without needing to alter the actual content of the file and that content is playable by pretty much every media device built in the last 15+ years.

HEIC isn't Apple's thing it's from the MPEGroup, also easily licensable by anybody. I guess the reason why it wasn't part of Windows 10 from the beginning is because they both came out in mid 2015. Windows 10 seems to have adopted it for viewing (and later editing) in 2018 but they make you hit a stupid download button in their store to get it so that's lame.

HEIC is a much better-compressed format than JPEG that all Androids support; iirc JPEG XL (kinda dead) and Google's WebP are the only other big-name formats with better photographic compression. Windows was the only major operating system that chose to have consumers separately pay the patent fee, none of which goes to Apple. Since Windows 11 22H2, HEIC images work out-of-the-box.

This is not an Apple thing. Android phones use HEIC by default as well. This is a good thing. HEIC uses smaller file sizes and has fewer artifacts than JPEG.

I just plug a cable from my iPhone to my Linux mint laptop and view/transfer what photos I want through my file browser… seems real easy.

Exactly. Android's default image format is HEIC as well. Jpeg is outdated and needs to die already.

Windows now supports other formats than BMP. It's already a huge progress.

How many distros support h264/265 out of the box? They probably don't support most HEIC images either since they're HEVC on the inside

Yeah, but I don't want to flip through photos in GIMP.

For just viewing image files, qView is much nicer. It literally just opens images.

Or even better, use ImageMagick.

I didn't take the photos.

This is a work problem and a lot of software we use isn't supported on Linux.