HEIC files?

[Clayton King]

I honestly thought I had worked with HEIC files from my iPhone in Designer and Publisher, but out of nowhere I'm getting errors that says HEIC format is not supported? Does anyone else have this issue? I'm on Windows 11, Affinity version 2.5.6.

[GarryP]

This sort of thing has been discussed in many threads.

Did you try searching the forums for heic windows ?

The most relevant of the search result is probably the 2.6 beta bug fix list.

[Clayton King]

I searched for HEIC but didn't find anything relevant. Will search differently.

[GarryP]

Where were you searching and how did you search?

[Ldina]

@Clayton King Yes, plenty of issues with HEIC, at least the latest versions created with an iPhone 16 camera (I'm running Affinity v2.5..7 on Mac M4 Sequoia).

File > Open from Affinity often (usually?, always?) results in an error message. If you open HEIC files from within Apple Photos (Edit With), Apple exports a JPG or TIFF that opens in Affinity. Some have had success opening HEIC from the Apple Photos App using ColorSync or Apple Preview, then RE-exporting to HEIC or other formats. These often open fine in Affinity, so there must be some metadata or formatting that Affinity doesn't like in the original HEIC capture.

Apple's latest HEIC and DNG files can be complicated. First, iPhone captures are often a merged HDR of many bracketed exposures, if the iPhone decides it is needed due to high contrast, etc. Second, Apple does quite a bit of processing magic and machine learning behind the scenes, and I don't know what Apple is writing to the HEIC or DNG file. Third, HEIC and DNG are containers that can hold one or more versions of an image, (RAW, JPG, TIFF, Previews, Gain Maps, etc). There are probably plenty of other things that contribute...I'm still rather confused about exactly what Apple does and what is inside those files, and a lot of this is not well documented (or at all). 

Opening from Apple Photos works, but what gets sent to Affinity can vary...8/16/32 bit, sRGB, P3, TIFF or JPEG, etc. If a RAW DNG file has been edited within Apple Photos, and is then opened from within Apple Photos using "Edit With", it opens as a bitmap file in the Photo Persona, and not as a RAW file. If that same file is UN-edited in Apple Photos, it opens in the Develop Persona as a RAW file. Lots of quirks, many of which, no doubt, originate with Apple. Some are probably attributable to Affinity.

There are quite a few discussions about this on the forum. Try doing a Google Search for keywords....Affinity...HEIC, etc.

EDIT: I just took a photo with my iPhone 16 Pro in Standard HEIC Mode (not RAW). I opened the file from Apple Photos using Edit With Affinity Photo 2. It opened fine as a 16-bit TIFF, but with an sRGB color space. Why sRGB? My Affinity settings have Display P3 as my standard RGB editing space, and Apple itself uses Display P3 too, so it seems strange that it would open in Affinity as sRGB. I assume that is what Apple sent to Affinity, but I guess it could be Affinity misinterpreting the profile and assigning sRGB.

I just opened the same HEIC file directly from AP, using File > Open (it worked fine this time, for whatever reason). However, the same file opened as an 8-bit JPEG file in Display P3 color space!! Same HEIC source file, two different file formats, bit depths and color spaces in AP. Haha. 😵‍💫

Anyway, this added information was just to accentuate how unpredictable things are at present. 

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "HEIC files made with iOS 18 are unsupported" (REF: AF-4369) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.3078). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.