Among the many new features in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is out-of-the-box support for HEIF/HEIC images.
Anyone using Ubuntu 24.04 won’t need to manually install any further packages to be able to view HEIF/HEIC thumbnail previews in the Nautilus file manager or open HEIF/HEIC files in the default Eye of GNOME image viewer app.
While HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) is not a very common web image format, it is now widely adopted on smartphones. Both Apple iPhone and newer Samsung devices save images in this format when taken with the default camera app.
This minor change is quite a welcome one.
HEIF is a format for image containers that was created by the MPEG group. It employs highly advanced compression algorithms that allow it to store images of superior quality and smaller file sizes compared to the conventional JPEG.
In fact, an HEIC image (HEIC is the main encoding format of HEIF, thus producing .heic file names) consumes half the room that a JPEG file of equivalent quality would require.
HEIF, as a container format, also facilitates certain advanced features such as image sequences, depth maps, and edit history.
According to the bug report, “libheif is prepared for inclusion in main. Deleting delta which removes libheif as a dependence. This will enable the decoding of HEIF files by libgd2.”
The significant effort to incorporate it into the main was given the green light within the final freeze timeframe, so anticipate its appearance in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS upon the stable, final version’s release on Thursday, April 25.