The requirements and main use cases of HEIF were defined in 2013. HEIF was adopted by Apple in 2017 with the introduction of iOS 11. Introduced in 2015, it was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and is defined as Part 12 within the MPEG-H media suite (ISO/IEC 23008-12). HEIF files are a special case of the ISO Base Media File Format ( ISOBMFF, ISO/IEC 14496-12), first defined in 2001 as a shared part of MP4 and JPEG 2000. Such files require less storage space than the equivalent quality JPEG. HEIF files containing HEVC-encoded images are also known as HEIC files.

HEVC is an image and video encoding format and the default image codec used with HEIF. HEIF can store images encoded with multiple coding formats, for example both SDR and HDR images. The standard covers multimedia files that can also include other media streams, such as timed text, audio and video. High Efficiency Image File Format ( HEIF) is a container format for storing individual digital images and image sequences.

Image/heif, image/heif-sequence image/heic, image/heic-sequence image/avifĭepends on contained Format (e.g.

Image viewer heic