Add support for the HEIF image format

[fleaz]

Description

Hey,
we are running a Craft site for a customer who wants to upload images directly from his iPhone what confronted us with the problem of handling *.heic files (Modern iOS devices shoot images in HEIF instead of JPEG).

We manually compiled a recent version of imagemagick with libheif on the server to get support for this image format and after adding heic to extraAllowedFileExtensions in the general config, one can successfully upload images in the HEIF format.

But Craft won't generate a thumbnail because it probably does not know that this is an image format (there is e.g. also no height/width information).

Are there any plans on adding HEIF support to Craft? Most distributions currently don't ship a recent enough version of Imagemagick (so you have compile it yourself), but this will hopefully change in the future :D

Best,
Felix

[codyjames]

Yup, we're running into this as well. Can't really launch without this support due to the nature of our project (hundreds of images uploaded by a community each day — many of which likely coming from iphones).

[andris-sevcenko]

I did look into this and the whole effort stopped in the Imagick PHP extension not being able to determine the colorspace of the HEIF image. Interestingly, ImageMagick via CLI was able to determine that.

Curios, @fleaz, what's the output you get if you do print_r((new Imagick('path/to/file.heif'))->getColorspace());?

[mattgrayisok]

Also tracking this for Servd.

@andris-sevcenko Using these two images:

https://filesamples.com/samples/image/heif/sample1.heif
https://filesamples.com/samples/image/heic/sample1.heic

On PHP 8.
ImageMagick 7.0.10-57.
Imagick commit '448c1cd0d58ba2838b9b6dff71c9b7e70a401b90' (built from master)

The output is 0 for both images.

On CLI:

bash-5.1# magick identify -verbose test.heic | grep space
  Colorspace: YCbCr

bash-5.1# magick identify -verbose test.heif
Killed

So it looks like Image Magick CLI is working ok for identification but has some memory issues when working with moderately large (2MB in this case) heif files - it allocated ~500MB RAM before it was killed.

[andris-sevcenko]

@mattgrayisok Thanks for the additional info!

Without knowing the colorspace, any image manipulation and preserving original colors is pretty much DOA, so currently no easy way on how Craft can implement this.

One way of proceeding about this, in general, is to refactor how images are manipulated in general by Craft to allow third parties to provide image drivers, in which case it would become possible for a plugin to provide an interface with the libheif tool, perhaps. This, of course, would be a rather significant undertaking but one we are discussing internally.

[fleaz]

Hey @andris-sevcenko
thanks for looking into this!

Just wanted to confirm that I get the same results as Matt on my machine (PHP 7.4, Imagick 7.0.11). Coincidentally we even used the same example images to test this :D

I also see huge memory allocation on the second image (~650-700MB) but after a while it return with YCbCr. The getColorSpace() also returns 0 for both images.

[brandonkelly]

Circled back on this today, and noticed the Imagine lib got updated recently to support HEIC. So I’ve pulled that in for the next Craft 3 and 4 releases. (d7ee2e2)

[brandonkelly]

Craft 3.7.63 and 4.3.6 are out with HEIC support!

[fleaz]

Awesome. Thanks for still thinking about this \o/

[sunscreem]

@brandonkelly Is it possible to disable this in the config? We're finding clients are uploading HEIF images but they aren't supported in Chrome or our version of imagemagik.

[RyanRoberts]

HEIF images but they aren't supported in Chrome

Or any browser? https://caniuse.com/?search=heif

[brandonkelly]

We don’t list it as a web-safe format here:

cms/src/helpers/Image.php

Lines 150 to 153 in c3afbef

	public static function webSafeFormats(): array
	{
	return ['jpg', 'jpeg', 'gif', 'png', 'svg', 'webp', 'avif'];
	}

So as long as you are outputting images with a transform (which you should always do, to be safe), HEIC/HEIF images will get converted to JPEGs.