The new series of smartphones Xiaomi Mi 10 allows, in addition to many other innovations, saving captured photos in the HEIF format. What this format offers and how it works, we’ll explain in this article.
What is the HEIF format?
The name HEIF was created by combining the initial letters of the words in the phrase High Effieciency Image File, which translates to high-efficiency image file. It’s also known as High Efficiency Image Coding (HEIC). It’s an efficient image file format based on the HEVC codec (High Efficiency Video Coding).
Unlike the JPEG file format, HEIF is not a file format, but rather a “container” for files. It can be a single image or a set or sequence of multiple images. It’s a new compression algorithm also implemented in iOS 11, which can reduce file sizes much more efficiently than JPEG.
Everything happens without reducing the image quality compared to storing it in other original formats.
Besides the most common JPEG formats, there are also BMP, PNG, TIFF, GIF and many others. For example, the BMP format usually doesn’t use compression; the image quality is the best, but it takes up more storage space. The PNG format supports transparent layers, and GIF is dynamic.
HEIF is able to compress images twice as efficiently as the old JPEG standard. This results in images that retain the same visual quality or even better, but on average they’re twice as small.
The new format supports image stacks, higher bit depths, embedded HDR metadata, depth maps, and also animations. These can store more information than in the GIF format, in a fraction of its size.
HEIF is not better than JPEG in terms of creating more high-quality compressed files. However, it is better when handling groups of consecutive images, because JPEG can process one image at a time.
Editing with HEIF
In practice, HEIF can capture the full range of expanded colors provided by the 10-bit color output of the camera sensor. It also supports transparency and 16-bit image color compared to 8-bit JPEG color. HEIF images can be rotated and cropped without changing or re-rendering the image. Thanks to that, it will be possible to undo such edits later at any time.
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The main advantage of using HEIF, however, is space savings when using high-resolution camera sensors. Resolution also affects the amount of photo data. The more pixels, the larger the resulting photo file size.
For example, when using a 108 MPx sensor, the photo size is approximately 12 MB. If we use the HEIF format to save the same photo, the size is only 4,43 MB, which saves 64% of space while maintaining the original image quality.
For example, on a Xiaomi 10 Pro with 512 GB of storage, if the remaining storage space is 428 GB, in JPG you can save 36 522 photos. With HEIF, it will be almost 100 000 photos. Choosing the default format is possible in the camera settings.
HEIF compatibility
This rather new format, developed in 2013 and used since 2015, is compatible with Android 10 as well as devices with iOS 11 or newer. The file extension for photos in the HEIF format is usually .eif or .heic.
If you need to convert the format to another file type, various well-known conversion programs can be used. Given the advantages of HEIF, it’s expected that it will become the standard for smartphones in the near future and over time may replace the outdated JPEG.
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