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In Kubuntu 24.04 I'm no longer able to view iPhone .HEIC images after I've installed iOS 18 on my iPhone. In Gwenview I get the error:

Loading image failed.

In GIMP I get the error:

Loading HEIF image failed: Invalid input: Unspecified: Metadata not correctly assigned to image.

ImageMagick, same type of error:

Invalid input: Unspecified: Metadata not correctly assigned to image.

Suggestions from this older Kubuntu 21.04 thread no longer work. How do I view iPhone iOS 18 sourced .HEIC images in Kubuntu 24.04? Is this also an issue with Ubuntu 24.04 or is it a KDE Plasma thing?

Archisman Panigrahi
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jophuh
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3 Answers3

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Try the libheif ppa which hosts an updated version of libheif (otherwise, later versions of libheif will only appear in the official repositories of later versions of Ubuntu. Non-security updates are not backported). Open a terminal and enter the following commands one by one.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/libheif
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt install libheif
sudo apt install libheif-plugin-libde265 libheif-plugin-aomenc libgd3 libheif1

As per the GitHub issue, the version 1.18.2 in the PPA (as of 31st October 2024) should contain the fix for this issue.

Edit: I verified that it works with the latest version of libheif on Arch Linux. (I tested the example HEIC file in the GitHub issue). Therefore, updating libheif on Ubuntu should fix the issue as well.

Archisman Panigrahi
  • 38,814
1

This issue occurs with iOS 18, older versions are not affected. We have to wait for official .heif update to work with.

Until then there is an unofficial build for libheif. Thanks to him, upgrade your current lib using following (ubuntu 24 comes with heif support)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/libheif

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

If don't have heif (usually have),

sudo apt install heif-gdk-pixbuf - decoder and encoder

sudo apt install heif-thumbnailer - show thumbnails

sudo aptinstall libheif-examples - converter (heic2jpeg, etc.)

Super Dog
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You can try the online, most latest version of the underlaying library everyone else uses here : https://strukturag.github.io/libheif/

This can open the images just in your browser, and as it allows you to at least save them to jpg, is a workaround until the fixed versions percolate throughout FOSS space.

RGD2
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