Well - Shame on me - I figured a year on this would be supported… Come on. Today I discovered Sync is a total non-working mess (except when it wants) and my most recent 2,000 pictures are invisible… Sigh…
Just as a heads up, this will take a while most likely, just like HEVC support. HEIC (or, HEIF) requires licensing, and tbh, along with HEVC, is a completely garbage format anyways thanks to MPEG just being utter dicks about things. Hence why AV1 (both a video and still image format) is starting to appear in favour of HEVC, being built by an open consortium.
Honestly, I won’t be surprised if HEIF support never appears. There’s only a handful of software that currents supports it. There isn’t a “whole load of pictures now getting taken in HEIF”, as iOS is currently the only thing that takes photos in HEIF, which was a really stupid move imho.
2024 now.
Most of the phones takes shots in HEIVC format by default. Please re-consider adding support for this. Free projects are able to display these formats, so there must be some way…
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??? any Words about Heic?
No, but they seem to be proud of having Pinch to Zoom 
The fact we have another way of viewing JPEG files is great. The PlexPhotos App is a nice tool for viewing photos on a smart phone. Unfortunately, still doesn’t support HEIC/HEIF.
So, you take a photo on your iPhone, and to be able to view this in the ‘PlexPhotos’ App on your iPhone you must first convert it to JPEG (and loose all the photo AI recognition that was tagged in the picture) , add all manual tags to be able to search, before you can view again in PlexPhotos.
Seems not to be the ideal situation !
It would be nice for the Plex team to finally address HEIC and tagging of photos once and for all.
Fully useless unless they Support HEIC.
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Give them time with this new app. I bet they add HEIC support. The fact that they are investing in a dedicated app is a good sign to me.
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Globally, Android has a 69.9% market share among smartphone users, compared to iPhone’s 29.3% market share. With over 6 billion smartphone users worldwide, that means there are approximately 4.2 billion Android devices, and 1.74 billion iOS devices. These are the two most widely used camera’s on the planet!
It might be a stupid idea for Apple to create their own photo format heic. However, it’s not like nobody uses their phones or iOS is some odd ball OS. It could not be more unreasonable that after SEVEN YEARS (since 2017) Plex still doesn’t support this heic format. 1.74 billion iOS users with built in cameras aren’t enough to convinced Plex. Even Google Drive and OneDrive support this format. Zero excuse Plex…wake up!
EDIT: Added sentence about other support from other services popular and a link to Flickr photography article .
Thanks for pointing that out, I’m not an Android user.
This means there’s a few billion more potential users with cameras always on them and saving to heic format! This reinforces the point that there’s no reason for Plex not to support heic format.
Too bad Apple has elected to use a single setting for photo and video quality and format setting. If I could change the setting for only photos, then they would be saved as jpg. Not willing to give up the high quality for video.
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Has there been any updates from the devs at this point?
Would really love to see support for HEIC/HEIF format.
The year 2025 has come, HEIC has been used by users around the world for many years, it is no longer the iPhone but also Android devices retain photos in Heic format to save space … PLEX Developers, please!!!
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Its never going to happen I guess, every photo server supports it these days except for Plex.
Just scrolled through this thread.. this is a joke right?
A common format for fotos not supported by Plex because of “time and prioritiy” issues since 2017.. but they make a foto app for the iphone that nobody asked for ..LOL
I’m a software dev myself since the last century. I’m not working with C++/C tech stack for quite some time now but googling around my tech stack i’m finding this immediatly:
GitHub - openize-com/openize-heic-net: Openize.HEIC is an open source implementation of the ISO/IEC 23008-12:2017 HEIF file format decoder
If Plex cant deliver HEIC its because they don’t want to deliver it. Probably they don’t have the knowledge hired for this low level stuff.
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The lack of support for this feature is the single most disappointing point of using Plex. No doubt there is a challenge with handling video as a picture within the photos subsystem, but most photo services have already solved this. It’s just Plex that seem to be stuck for whatever reason. At this point though, that reason can’t still be justified and if I had to guess, they are stuck in analysis paralysis, they just don’t know how to move forward with this feature.
Plex, deliver something, anything that support this format. Something is better than nothing.
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Plex needs to clean house, starting with management. As they have proven for over a decade, they have a history of mostly not listening to users needs.
gotta admit.. the Nokia license is weirdly worded.. almost weaselwords
license is royalty free but not the codec? so.. displaying is free but using the codec (to compress the images) is not? sounds like a long-term money grab.
compared to the JPEG license:
“2. You can use this software for whatever you want. You don’t have to pay us.”
8 years, 4 months & 3 weeks and this is still an outstanding request needed by essentially anyone with a mobile phone that uses Plex Photos… <slow clap for the plex team>
(and to add to the pisstake, you can upload an HEIC image to be your profile picture on this forum…)
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