The Stovebolt Site Forums The Back Office IT Short Bus Photo Formats

Hello and many thanks for all you do to keep the forum operating from an IT perspective.

What actions or considerations are there for expanding the acceptable photo formats in include those for pictures taken with newer iPhones and iPads? My iPhone 11 operating on iOS 14.4 create pictures in the HEIC format.

By the way, I do hate the stupid "Live" feature that makes a 1 second video out of every picture. That creates an MOV format and typically at least doubles the file size. I'm not sure you want to start accepting those.

Thank you,

There are settings on iphones to transfer those HEIC format files to JPEG (I think if you connect to a PC.)
Also turn off that stupid live feature. The phone stores two files for each picture and if LIVE is turned off it only stores the still file.

On the iPhone, go to settings, scroll down and click on “Camera”, click on “Formats” and click “Most Compatible”. That will save your photos in a JPEG format.

While your there, click on “Preserve Settings”, click on the slider for “Live Photo” and make sure it’s green. That will preserve you last setting and not automatically reset it to “Live Photo”.

Hope this helps!

Phil, thanks. I just did that on my iPhone. I don’t take many photos with it but the process may save me a headache in the future.

Just watch when your phone gets updated. Sometimes the updates change settings back to the defaults and you’ll have to change them back. This is especially true on major updates like a new version of IOS.

Thanks for the input, Rusty! I am not yet familiar with that format so thanks for bringing it to my attention. I will be more than willing to take a look at it and, if the UBB software allows, add it to our accepted formats.

Are you an IT person? Or at least someone with interest in that area? Please PM me (and include Baldeagle) if so ...

Thanks!
John

Hello to all and many thanks for the responses.

I especially appreciate Phil's guidance on managing the photo file format and the live feature. I also agree that you have to keep a sharp eye on settings and preferences with software updates.

Apple products default photos to the HEIC format which is exclusive to them. It is a version of the HEIF format that uses compression technology. It has the photo resolution of a JPEG file at about half the file size. HEIC is one of the formats that the industry is considering as a replacement for JPEG. That would be a long term transition.

John: I will send a PM.

I found that emailing pix to myself 1. makes them smaller, and 2. turns the HEIC into a jpg.

I just learned about this for my mac. Another simple fix is to drag or move HEIC images that you want to upload to a folder on the desktop. This will save them as JPEG in that folder. Then you can upload as a JPEG from that folder.

Mark

HEIC is only supported by Apple products due to hefty royalty fees. It's likely to remain that way for some time, so use a converter to change them to png or jpg format. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/b...n-2019-jpeg-webp-heic-avif-41ba0c1b2789/

You can change the setting in your iOS device to turn off Live Photos
You can also set the camera to create jpgs instead
You can also create a lower quality png copy of your high quality image directly in your camera roll on iOS without any spyware converter (there is no free converter, you are paying with the embedded image information that is data mined, your photo contents also get used and belongs to them once you upload your image for conversion).

Settings- camera- formats
(Set this to most compatible for jpgs)
Settings- camera- preserve settings- Live Photo
(turn this setting on, so that is remembers in camera app that you turned off Live Photos and it will stay off permanently)

In photos if you want to make a forum friendly version of any photo
Get it to the size you want by pinching and zooming
Then take a screen shot of it
Then you edit the screen shot in you camera roll to trim it to size
This lower resolution image will be a PNG and will upload just fine without any embedded data like location.
This method is easy to capture a frame in a video for instance.
-s

Wow. Speaking of screen shots, can you take a few and include some images for folks may have visuals?

Is this for cell phone and other Apple products (pad, PC, etc.).

We are not Apple people here at HQ soooo ....

I attached some marked up screen shots of the camera setting in iPhone iOS that I just took for this post
The most tricky one is setting the Live Photo setting to GREEN or ON which means the opposite of what you are trying to achieve
This means “yes I want camera to remember to keep it OFF”
In the screen shot of the camera app
The Red A arrow points to the Live Photo OFF setting
If you do not turn ON the setting persistence in settings this tiny OFF switch in the photos app will reset to ON when you relaunch the app

The green arrows on the photos app screen shot call out where the buttons on the sides of the phone are located
To take a screen shot press the side button and volume up together
This action will work on iPads and iPods too
Screen shot always works in any app at any instance
It’s an operating level behavior

Hopefully this information helps a bit and isn’t too confusing
-s

Almost 40% of the visits to our site are from people using Windows versions 7 thru 10. JPEG is the best choice today.

2ManyTrucks, not too confusing. I liked the image of the settings. I'd think that would help.


Wow, Gordon. Some are on Windows 7? Wish we could find out who's on a PC vs other hardware. We are trying to keep the cell phone users in mind with what we do.

Turns out this was a good thread to revive. Hope it helps some folks. (Do we need to re-name this thread then???)

Bear in mind that the operating systems are reported via the user's browser. Some browsers are not reporting/hiding the operating system and some may be reporting the wrong operating system. Doubt anyone is still using Win XP, but it's on the list. What operating system are the bots reporting? Dunno.

Consider the numbers rough approximations.

I regularly post from my phone usually running the latest iOS
So far the forum has worked as expected and I haven’t had unsupported features
When I want to make super detailed posts like the radio restoration posts I do those on macOS
If I ever were to run into an incompatibility I would search who to contact and let them know
I suspect there are a few other users like me using different platforms so as long as the folks that run the site take feedback this whole place will get a thorough interoperability vetting on a regular basis
-s