IEC 23008-12 High Efficiency Image File Format

Added in version 3.2.

Driver short name

HEIF

Build dependencies

libheif (>= 1.1), built against libde265

High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is a container format for individual images and image sequences. The driver has mostly been developed and tested to be able to read images using the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, ITU-T H.265) codec. Such images are usually called HEIC (HEVC in HEIF) files, and have the .heic extension. iOS 11 can generate such files.

libheif 1.4 or later is needed to support images with more than 8-bits per channel.

Later versions of libheif may also support one or more of AVIF (AV1 in HEIF), JPEG, JPEG 2000 and uncompressed images depending on compile-time options.

The driver can read EXIF metadata (exposed in the EXIF metadata domain) and XMP metadata (exposed in the xml:XMP metadata domain)

The driver will expose the thumbnail as an overview (when its number of bands matches the number of bands in the full resolution image).

If a file contains several top-level images, they will be exposed as GDAL subdatasets.

AVIF support

Starting with GDAL 3.10, the AVIF_HEIF companion driver to the HEIF driver may be used to open images encoding with the AVIF (AV1 Image File) codec if the AVIF -- AV1 Image File Format driver is not available and if libheif has been compiled with support for one of the libraries it support that are able of AV1 decoding (libaom or libdav1d).

Driver capabilities

Supports VirtualIO

if libheif >= 1.4

Supports CreateCopy()

This driver supports the GDALDriver::CreateCopy() operation

Built hints on Windows

Download source archives for libheif at https://github.com/strukturag/libheif and libde265 at https://github.com/strukturag/libde265
Unpack the archives (for example libde265-1.0.5.tar.gz and libheif-1.7.0.tar.gz)

Build libde265:

cd libde265-1.0.5
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=c:/dev/install-libheif
cmake --build . --config Release --target install
cd ..
copy libde265\de265.h c:/dev/install-libheif/include/libde265
copy libde265\de265-version.h c:/dev/install-libheif/include/libde265
cd ..

Build libheif with libde265 support:

cd libheif-1.7.0
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" .. \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=c:/dev/install-libheif \
    -DLIBDE265_FOUND=ON \
    -DLIBDE265_CFLAGS=/Ic:/dev/install-libheif/include \
    -DLIBDE265_LIBRARIES=c:/dev/install-libheif/lib/libde265

Add in GDAL's nmake.local the following lines before building GDAL:

HEIF_INC = -Ic:\dev\install-libheif\include
HEIF_LIB = C:\dev\install-libheif\lib\heif.lib