Decide how to handle HEIF files
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 2/5
- Estimated time
- 1-3 hours
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Activity status
- Active
- Tech stack
- macos, shell
- Domain
- developer-experience
Research direction
The issue body holds the working notes: switching Screenshot's Capture Format back to PNG, a defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png command, and sips/ImageMagick conversion commands. The title asks for a decision, and the payload never says whether that means a config change, a script, or a doc page, so confirm with the maintainer first. Done means the chosen approach is recorded and the commands are checked on a Mac running Tahoe.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
The HEIF switch comes from an HDR screenshot option Apple added in Tahoe. On supported Macs running macOS Tahoe 26 or later, if the Capture Format setting in the Screenshot app is set to HDR, screenshots are captured in HEIF format and screen recordings in HEVC. On some Macs, the system prompts you during a capture to switch to an HDR format, and after that every screenshot is saved as HEIC. That is probably how it got turned on for you.
Switching back to PNG
Press ⌘⇧5, open Options, and set Capture Format to SDR (Most Compatible). That menu switches between SDR, which saves PNG, and HDR, which saves HEIF/HEIC.
You can also set it from the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
killall SystemUIServer screencaptureui 2>/dev/null
The type key is undocumented by Apple and may be ignored on newer macOS versions, including some Tahoe installations, so the menu setting is the one that reliably controls the format.
Converting existing HEIC files
sips is built into macOS and uses Apple's own decoder:
for f in *.heic; do sips -s format png "$f" --out "${f%.heic}.png"; done
With ImageMagick 7 (the Homebrew build includes libheif):
magick -list format | grep -i heic # confirm HEIC support
magick in.heic -depth 8 out.png # single file
magick mogrify -format png -depth 8 *.heic # batch, writes next to originals
Use -depth 8 because HDR captures are 10-bit, and without it ImageMagick may write 16-bit PNGs that are about twice the size.
With libheif directly: heif-dec in.heic out.png. Older versions name the tool heif-convert.
PNG can't store HDR, so every one of these tools will compress the bright highlights into the normal brightness range. If ImageMagick's output looks too bright or too dull, try sips, which uses the same image framework as Preview.
- Dominant language
- Shell
- Stars
- 1
- Forks
- 0
- Avg merge
- 14h 36m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 3
Getting set up
- No Dockerfile or Docker Compose file
- Has a pull request template
- No contributing guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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