Open up Microsoft Edge or your favorite other browser and go to Notice that it’s free for personal use, which is what we’re talking about, but if you are going to use it commercially, CopyTrans will ask that you pay for a commercial license.

That opens up the Microsoft Store and offers up a commercial solution:īefore you click Buy and pay $0.99 to add this feature from Microsoft (and really, Microsoft, why isn’t this free?) let’s look at the CopyTrans solution because it’s free and free is always better than paid, right? 🙂 To follow this particular breadcrumb trail, let’s go ahead and click on the “ Download codecs at Microsoft Store” link. Photos refers to ‘codecs’ here and a codec is a compress / decompress low level utility that the program would access to be able to open up and display the HEIC file. Photos seems like a good option given that it’s a photograph, right? So let’s try that! You can see that it is correctly identified as HEIC, but a double click shows Windows doesn’t really know what to do with it: To start, here’s a HEIC image in Windows: Let’s have a look, and you’ll see how to install CopyTrans HEIC for Windows and how it makes your Windows 10 computer better and smarter both. There are a couple of ways you can fix the problem, but my favorite involves installing a free program from a company called CopyTrans that includes low-level format support for HEIC that enhances Microsoft programs too! The long and short of it is that HEIF is supported by all the modern Apple gear, from Macs to Apple Watches, but Microsoft hasn’t yet adopted the image format and so its support for HEIC images is, well, lacking. Got it? Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz! And that’s based on the HEVC (High Efficiency Video Compression) or H.265 video format already used on modern iPhones. They’re good, but the engineers at Apple decided to adopt a newer option called HEIC, or “high efficiency image compression”, which should more accurately be known as HEIF or “high efficiency image format”.

Those stand for “joint photographic expert group” and “progressive network graphics”, if you’re curious.

There are dozens and dozens of different image formats in use nowadays, with the most common being JPEG and PNG.

Heic image viewer windows 10 download