Today I was blindsided by the existence of HEIC images, because I don’t often receive images from iPhone/iPad users. Since Pop!_OS is still running Ubuntu 22.04, I not only didn’t have the library I needed to view these images, but when I found the library I needed, the standard package manager had an out-of-date version for the images I was trying to view. It took an hour of stumbling around to track down a solution.

The Solution

Install the latest version of the libheif package from the Ubuntu PPA.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:strukturag/libheif
$ sudo nala install libheif1 heif-gdk-pixbuf heif-thumbnailer

The Symptom

I couldn’t open the HEIC images using eog, but I could open them using GIMP. I wanted to convert the images in bulk to JPG, so I didn’t stop at using GIMP to convert the images one by one using the UI.

Attempt 1

I tried to install heif-gdk-pixbuf, but then neither magick nor eog could read the image. I got this error message:

Could not read HEIF/AVIF file: Invalid input: Unspecified: Metadata not correctly assigned to image

This is how I learned that the version (1.12) of libheif that ships (as of the date of writing this) in the Ubuntu package manager can’t read HEIC images taken on iOS 18. I needed to install the latest version (1.19.8) from the Ubuntu PPA listed in the solution.

Now I can receive images from my friends who use iOS 18 and, so far, all the image tools I use can read the images without issue.