HEIC/HEIF support in photo libraries (new photo format for iPhones)

[zevth]

I never realised this was an issue, just recently got myself an Oppo Find X3 and was wondering why some of my pictures are not shown in Plex until I realised I enabled 10bit photos which means images are saved as HEIC format which leads me here.
Any timeline for this will be highly appreciated as I do not want to convert my pictures to JPEG and lose quality.

[elan]

@flow

working on enabling support for HEIC/HEIF in Plex

It’s not an easy task. The library we use for photo decoding never added support for HEIF (it’s a complex format) so we would need to move to another library, which is in itself complicated (need to identify one which supports HEIF and all the other functionality we use, convert all the code over to use it, etc.)

@flow

they have done so much personal media stuff the last year

Thank you for recognizing this

[elan]

@flow

don’t you think that four (4) years should have been easily enough time to figure it out?

In theory, given enough time anything is possible; unfortunately in that time, the library we do use didn’t add HEIF support, and it was only recently that another library did (which also has other limitations). So sadly it’s just not been an easy thing to do.

@flow

may I bring you something to your attention outside of your plexamp bias

Hey, I love music, it’s something I’ve been passionate about since I was a young kid, so please don’t hold it against me.

@flow

I don’t care if you fix it or not, I’m not using it, but it’s a very sad story for the users that do.

I agree. And with ANY product, it’s possible to cherry pick and focus on the things which aren’t fixed, or the features which aren’t added. There are always limited resources, and prioritization which has to take place. We’ll never make everyone happy, fix everyone’s bugs, or add everyone’s features. Software is unfortunately a lot like triage at a hospital…

[danildungeon]

It would be helpful not to advertise „we support ANY photo format“ as this is definitely not true!

[sthomasdavis_gmail_com]

@elan

It’s not an easy task. The library we use for photo decoding never added support for HEIF (it’s a complex format) so we would need to move to another library, which is in itself complicated (need to identify one which supports HEIF and all the other functionality we use, convert all the code over to use it, etc.)

I appreciate you taking the time to give us an update! Glad to hear that you are still at least looking into it.

[elan]

@flow

As I just said above. You can’t make everyone happy, but loosing your focus on things that seem to matter to users is maybe one of the issues

Keep in mind you’re focusing on me here, and I am but one person in a growing company! I don’t have day to day oversight/view into who’s doing what

[Becki]

hi elan! I skim over the thread and you are a good speaker
but what does it all mean? could we expect something in the next few year?
is heif a topic for plex in view of the effort?

i personaly would like to know. since years I think ahhh… plex will bring heif support, but when I read this, I think not.

[elan]

@Becki

could we expect something in the next few year?
is heif a topic for plex in view of the effort?

As I explained, right now it’s mostly out of our hands as we wait to see what happens with a few different image processing libraries.

[PriamX]

I was saddened and frustrated by the loss of the Plex Camera Sync feature…I used it a lot.

What I did in it’s place was add an Apache WebDAV service on my Plex server (Linux-based), and am now using the Premium ($) version of PhotoSync for iOS which can sync to a WebDAV service. Then I simply created Plex photo libraries for my WebDAV directories.

As an option, the PhotoSync app will convert from HEIC to JPEG upon syncing. However, I’d prefer to keep my photos in the original HEIC format when I occasionally “sync-back” to my iPhone.

I am looking forward to Plex supporting HEIC; thank you for the updates.

[Psuhammer]

The last I read the issue was FFmpeg. It still does not support HEIF(C) and that is, I believe, what Plex uses. So, I understand Elan’s stance here.

That said, if people are so invested, how about a few ambitious developers get over to the FFmpeg project and close some of those tasks to get it working!?

I will say that Plex was quick to adopt Dolby Vision metadata once MKV containers started supporting it.

EDIT: Here is the latest ticket I could find for this. Looks like no one has really dedicated themselves to taking this on: #6521 (HEIF support) – FFmpeg

[elan]

@Psuhammer

The last I read, the issue was FFmpeg. It still does not support HEIF(C) and that is, I believe, what Plex uses. So, I understand Elan’s stance, here.

FFmpeg is one part; we actually use FreeImage for image analysis.

[slayercek]

+1 for HEIC support, moved my whole iCloud gallery to PLEX, sadly, can’t view photos from my iPhone. Looking forward to this feature.

Thank you elan for keeping us posted.

[Psuhammer]

GitHub - mnaydenov/FreeImage-Sidecar: An add-on library to FreeImage, which...

Looky, looky!

[elan]

Thanks very much, added this to our internal issue./

[arsamaroo]

Thank you Mr. Elan for looking into this issue. It’s a major concern for me and I am sure many others in the Plex community. I am really looking forward to buying the lifetime pass soon. Not having this support means that over 50% of my photos would not be visible in Plex unless I convert them to JPEG. This is about 50k photos to convert. This is really a waste of valuable/limited resources for so many of your customers and faithful users.

I am really looking forward to making full use of all the features Plex has to offer, but this is one of my biggest pain points with plex right now.

Another problem is that photo slideshows do not play as they should (auto transition to the next photo) on Apple TV or any Apple device for me. This is another major hurdle to overcome with sharing my photo media content with family and friends (90% of the people I know). This is not an issue on Samsung TVs or Firesticks, but all Apple products have this problem. I would really appreciate it if you can look into this problem as well.

So far using the product and testing it out with my 3 months premium pass, I found it very cumbersome, and really a hit or miss to get my iTunes library with smart playlists, play counts, and all the work I’ve curated in there for over 25 years to load up in Plex. Once I was able to get the content in plex, it was extremely difficult to us the playlists and collections functionality to create the kinds of playlists that I want to see. Also, I couldn’t easily share the playlists that actually made their way through into plex with family and friends.

I would be more than happy to work directly with one of your developers to explain and provide more details on this if anything is unclear. I have a computer science background, I have a passion for multimedia and I am very optimistic about this product, I want to love it and I want to share it with everyone I know, but I also need to know that someone is least listening and doing something about the issues I am facing with the product.

[davechap]

Wow. I came in here expecting to find an answer (an update, a plugin, whatever) to my many many HEIC files not displaying in Plex, only to find the answer is “it doesn’t”! Seriously??? How out of date is the platform if it doesn’t support a format that’s been around for … what … four or five years now??? C’mon guys … if you want to call this a contemporary media management platform, how can you possibly claim that standard if you don’t support this, or give any indication as far as I can see from a scan of the above, that you plan to do so soon. Ugh. How very very disappointing.

[davechap]

haha. Psuhammer … I just had a quick rant about lack of HEIC etc support and was about to add ‘btw … why not just use a 3rd party util, of which there are many now, to do this’ when I saw your brilliant post. Love it … seconding this to Plex developers to fix what’s a blindingly deficient area of the platform!!!

[fmnamado]

Please support this +1

[stevenha]

Another user who wants to see support for this so I don’t have to convert all my images.

Also miss Photo upload, which was a great feature, much more useful than all the more recent additions like TV shows which is much better served by other solutions.

[djfluo]

+1 we really need it !