Who Created the HEIC File Format? The Full Story

Updated August 12, 2026 · 7 min read

Ask ten people who created the HEIC file format and nine will say Apple. It is a reasonable guess, since iPhones made the format famous, and it is wrong. HEIC was designed by an international standards committee, with a Finnish phone maker doing much of the heavy lifting, and it was finished two full years before Apple shipped it. This is the story of who actually built the format sitting behind every modern iPhone photo.

If you want a primer on the format itself before the history lesson, start with our explainer on what a HEIC file is. Here we focus on the people and organizations behind it.

No, Apple did not invent HEIC

Let us kill the myth first. Apple announced HEIF/HEIC support at WWDC in June 2017 and shipped it that September in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra, making HEIC the default camera format on compatible iPhones. Overnight, a format almost nobody had heard of became the output of one of the most-used cameras on the planet.

That was adoption, not invention. By June 2017 the standard had been sitting finished for two years. What Apple contributed was distribution and timing: hardware HEVC encoding needs modern silicon, roughly the iPhone 7 generation of chips or newer, and by 2017 enough of the installed base qualified. Apple bet that halving the storage cost of every photo was worth years of "why won't my photo open" complaints. Judged by the fact that HEIC is still the iPhone default nearly a decade later, the bet paid off.

Apple also never locked users in. To this day, an iPhone can be switched back to JPG under Settings > Camera > Formats by choosing "Most Compatible" instead of "High Efficiency", and Settings > Photos offers an "Automatic" transfer mode that converts photos to JPG when copying to a Mac or PC over USB. Those escape hatches exist precisely because Apple knew it was pushing a format the rest of the world had not caught up with.

Crediting Apple with HEIC is like crediting the biggest radio station with writing the song. The writers were elsewhere.

Meet MPEG, the group that actually created it

HEIC's real author is MPEG, the Moving Picture Experts Group: a working group operating under ISO/IEC, the international standards organizations. If the name sounds familiar, it should. MPEG is the group behind the MP3-era audio standards, the MP4 container and the HEVC video codec. A large share of all the media any device plays passes through formats this committee defined.

In 2013, MPEG defined the requirements for a modern image format: one file that could hold multiple images, rich metadata, transparency and state-of-the-art compression. Work proceeded through the usual standards machinery of proposals, drafts and ballots, and the technical specification was finalized in mid-2015 as ISO/IEC 23008-12, formally known as "MPEG-H Part 12", and informally as HEIF, the High Efficiency Image File Format.

HEIC is the branded flavor of that standard: a HEIF file whose images are compressed with the HEVC codec. When your iPhone saves a .heic file, it is executing a design decision made in an ISO committee room, not in Cupertino.

Nokia's role: the engineers behind the standard

Standards committees do not write code, companies do, and the company that mattered most for HEIF was Nokia Technologies. Nokia was a key developer and contributor to the specification, and it published the reference implementation of HEIF, the canonical codebase other developers build against, openly on GitHub (github.com/nokiatech/heif).

Nokia also made an unusually friendly licensing move: it grants its HEIF patents royalty-free for non-commercial use. That decision lowered the barrier for researchers, hobbyists and open-source projects to experiment with the format years before any phone shipped it by default.

Where the compression came from: HEVC

The codec doing the actual pixel-squeezing has its own parentage. HEVC, also known as H.265, was standardized in 2013 by JCT-VC, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding: a partnership between MPEG and VCEG, the video experts group of the ITU-T, the UN's telecommunications standards agency. Two rival standards families pooled their best engineers to build a codec efficient enough for 4K video.

HEIF's designers made a pragmatic call: instead of inventing yet another still-image codec, reuse the best video compression available and apply it to single frames. That is why a HEIC photo is, at heart, one HEVC-compressed video frame in an image wrapper, and why it beats JPG so decisively on file size.

Why create a new format at all?

By the early 2010s, JPEG was showing its age everywhere. Published in 1992 by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, it compresses with a technique called the discrete cosine transform, stores exactly one image per file, caps color at 8 bits per channel, has no transparency, and degrades a little on every re-save. None of that could be fixed without breaking the one thing JPEG had going for it: universal support on every device, browser, printer and web form built since the 1990s.

Meanwhile smartphones had turned everyone into a photographer with a storage problem. Photo resolutions climbed, burst shooting and live photos multiplied the frames per shot, and cloud backends were paying for every redundant byte. MPEG's answer attacked both fronts at once: HEVC compression delivered files typically 40 to 50 percent smaller than JPG at the same visual quality, and the flexible container added the features 1992 could never have imagined, including bursts and sequences in one file, depth maps, alpha transparency, up to 16-bit color with HDR, and non-destructive edits stored as instructions.

The timeline at a glance

What happened after Apple adopted it

Apple's 2017 move turned a dormant standard into an ecosystem. Android had shipped read support for HEIF in Android 8, and Android 10 (2019) added HEIC support on capable hardware. Samsung put an HEIF capture option in Galaxy phones from the S10 onward, with other makers such as Xiaomi (Xiaomi 12) and OPPO (Reno 7) following.

Then the camera industry arrived. Canon's EOS-1D X Mark III and EOS R5, R6 and R8, Sony's a1 and a7 IV, Fujifilm's X-H2S, X-H2, X-T5 and X100VI, Nikon's Z9 and Z8, and Hasselblad's X2D all shoot HEIF, typically as 10-bit HDR stills that JPG simply cannot represent. For the full map of which devices, apps and platforms speak the format today, see our overview of where HEIC is used.

Desktop software followed at its own pace. GIMP has read and exported HEIC since version 2.10.2 in May 2018, while Photoshop reads the files (8-bit) but still cannot save them. Microsoft split the difference on Windows: Windows 10 needs Store add-ons, including an HEVC extension that usually costs about $0.99, while Windows 11 22H2 and later ship HEIF support built in. And the patent friction that kept HEIC out of browsers pushed the industry toward royalty-free successors: AVIF, built on the AV1 codec, and JPEG XL were designed to deliver the same ideas without the licensing bill, and iOS 16 and later can already display AVIF.

What never arrived is universal support for HEIC itself. As of late 2025, Safari remains the only major browser that displays it, and plenty of web forms and marketplaces still reject the files outright. That gap between where HEIC is created and where it is accepted is exactly why a free HEIC to JPG converter still earns its keep: the format won the camera, but JPG still owns the web. Ours converts at full resolution with Exif metadata preserved, starts automatically on upload, and hands a multi-photo batch back as a single ZIP.

The credits, properly assigned

So who created the HEIC file format? MPEG wrote the standard and finalized it in mid-2015. Nokia Technologies did much of the engineering and published the reference implementation. JCT-VC, the joint MPEG and ITU-T VCEG team, supplied the HEVC compression in 2013. And Apple, in 2017, did what only Apple could: it put the whole thing in a billion pockets and made the rest of the industry react.