HEIC

Apple introduced HEIC at WWDC in June 2017 and shipped it that autumn with iOS 11, making it the default photo-capture format on any device with an A9 chip or later. The pitch was straightforward: HEVC/H.265 intra-frame coding delivers roughly 40–50% smaller files than JPEG at comparable visual quality, directly cutting device storage pressure and iCloud sync costs as camera sensors kept growing. Because HEIC is Apple’s specific codec-plus-container pairing rather than an independently standardized format, its long-term ecosystem health is tied to HEVC’s patent-licensing landscape, which spans several competing pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and others).

For a DAM, HEIC is overwhelmingly an ingest problem rather than a delivery format, given how many uploads now arrive from iPhones by default. Server-side thumbnail and preview generation requires an HEVC-capable decoder (typically via libheif), which not every imaging library ships with by default, and because no non-Apple browser renders HEIC inline, any web-facing preview has to be transcoded to JPEG or WebP — there’s no way around this step for a DAM serving assets to a general audience.

HEIC does carry EXIF and XMP reliably inside its ISOBMFF container, so metadata-driven search doesn’t have to suffer just because an asset arrived as HEIC — but conversion is where things go wrong in practice. Some third-party HEIC-to-JPEG converters silently drop EXIF or XMP during transcoding, so a DAM’s ingest pipeline needs to verify metadata survives the conversion rather than assume it does, and should default to normalizing HEIC uploads to a more broadly compatible master format.