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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! 

websta91's avatar
websta91
New member | Level 2
I suspect this might have something to do with new photo sizes introduced in iOS 11?

Sounds like a problem for Dropbox to fix, not Apple
JSampo's avatar
JSampo
New member | Level 2
8 years ago
This is an IOS 11 beta camera default option. Just change the setting with the camera settings to most compatible and new photos will be encoded into jpg format instead of heic.
  • FJJ's avatar
    FJJ
    New member | Level 2
    8 years ago

    This doesn't help the photos already on the phone... No way to get them in a usable format on my computer.

    • Mark's avatar
      Mark
      Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
      8 years ago
      You need to speak to Apple about the Beta FJJ.

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