It used to be that when we open a photo on the computer, we just double click on it and the photo will open. Now, as a sign of progress, this simple process might not work straight away anymore. We are all used to the pictures files being jpegs ending in .jpg – well, there is now a new file format in town that all modern smartphones – especially in new iPhones, will produce that your windows computer will no longer be able to open straight away as it did with the standard JPEG files. This new photo file format has the ending of . HEIC.
It used to be that windows would automatically prompt you to install a new bit of free software to open these files – but now it wants to charge 79p for the privilege.
There are free alternative ways of opening these new photo files, and the best option we’ve tested is to use this bit of free software from CopyTrans which would install the missing bits of software to allow for the computer to be able to open these photo files again just by double clicking on them. So far the only downside we’ve experienced is that the photo previews still won’t work in Microsoft Outlook – but they will work in windows explorer. A nuisance but we’ll take it.
To download this software go to this website: https://www.copytrans.net/copytransheic/
Another option is to use the free HEIF utility, but we found that to be less streamlined than with CopyTrans. https://liuziangexit.com/HEIF-Utility/EN
