r/GIMP • u/Sandy_W • 3d ago

HEIC?

My wife has an iPhone. She sends me HEIC pics. I'm pretty sure that GIMP used to open them. Not now. It errors when I double-click on an HEIC file. Fine, just open GIMP and select it. It's not there. Huh? I can see it in Files! (Ubuntu laptop). Go to another picture folder. Files shows JPGs, HEICs, and a PNG. GIMP shows the JPGs and the PNG, does not list the HEICs as if it's not recognized as a file type it should be messing with. GitHub supposedly has a plug-in. It warns that the plugin is only for version 2.something.something and earlier. Fire up GIMP again. Version 3.0.0, which sounds kinda fishy to me. Who releases a version .0.0? There's ALWAYS bugs...

Can't find a "update me" function in GIMP. Load the software center, find GIMP. Huh. Yep, it says I have 3.0.0, and no info is available on that version. No "update" button there, either. Also, it says all my software is up to date, which should be right because I have 'look for updates but ask me first' set. Fine. Terminal: apt update gimp. Update does not allow arguments. Okay, apt update. File access failed. Oh, yeah, sudo, sure. Working...working...working...all packages are up to date.

What do I have to do to get GIMP to recognize HEIC files again?

(Update: GitHub -which I do NOT understand- says that v3.0.2 was released a week ago, but no packages are available yet for Linux. I'm not gonna try to compile it myself, that way lies madness. I was perfectly comfortable programming in C/ASM on DOS with XMS for memory management. Trying it on Linux only leads to ulcer medications. I do wonder if I should set up a GitHub account just so I can suggest that maybe, just maybe, the package might be more useable if it had some kind of 'look for updates' function.)

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u/schumaml GIMP Team 3d ago

Do you know what package type you have installed?

On Ubuntu, this could be the repository package (which is likely not GIMP 3.0.x yet, unless you'd be using Ubuntu Plucky), Snap (most likely), or Flatpak (which can easily be updated to 3.0.2).

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u/Sandy_W 3d ago edited 3d ago

I do not remember what I installed years ago. I ALSO don't remember recently allowing a GIMP update, but I may have. Several other comments here are complaints that it updated to 3.0.0 without permission, which frankly should be impossible on Linux. Maybe I just clicked on accept without noticing GIMP on the list. Anyway, no idea. Oh, I have a folder snap/gimp/502/.config/GIMP/3.0 created on Sunday 3/30/25 so Snap.

Update: And yes, using Flatpack to install 3.0.2 fixed the HEIC issue, as well as apparently many other issues I'll never notice because all I use GIMP for is to convert my wife's HEIC and the internet's WEBP formats into JPG for my 'funny pictures' folder. After I installed flatpack, of course. Still, both installs worked flawlessly. And I got to see the picture my wife took last week of me, her, and her dad.

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u/schumaml GIMP Team 3d ago edited 3d ago

My guess would be that many people do not realize how their package management works, or bother to check what packages are getting updated.

You also get the inverse, i.e. people wondering why they do not get the most current versions, not realizing that e.g. Ubuntu sticks to a specific package version in their bi-annual releases, and some do not even change to the current one of those and stay with the release they installed years ago.

With snap and flatpak, updating is usually a single command for all installed snap or flatpak packages, snap refresh and flatpak update, respectively, which might be run periodically without user interaction, but this depends on Ubuntu's decisions in your case, and I am not that familiar with Ubuntu. You are usually not asked for permission for individual application updates, as most people don't care.

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u/schumaml GIMP Team 3d ago

The issue of HEIC support would be a question of "Does the GIMP snap package include HEIC/HEIF support?" then.

The snap package is not maintained by the GIMP developers, so we need to go elsewhere: https://github.com/snapcrafters/gimp

To check for the problem, and report it if necessary, we go to the issues list there: https://github.com/snapcrafters/gimp/issues

In this case, we find that this has already been reported, just a few hours ago: https://github.com/snapcrafters/gimp/issues/390

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u/Sandy_W 3d ago

No, the question apparently is "Does the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time v3.0.0 support ANY plug-ins?" and the answer is "No, it does not. Any GIMP functions which require a plug-in were disabled in 3.0.0. Plugins work again, in 3.0.2. It's just that Canonical is doing their due diligence and has not yet released 3.0.2 for Ubuntu. Hopefully they will bless it soon. If I find out tonight that they have a serious reason for rejecting it, well, I'll let you know what happens. Meanwhile, I can email my wife and sound knowledgeable because I got to actually open the HEIC picture she sent me.

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u/schumaml GIMP Team 3d ago

This experience and conclusion is not shared by the majority of users.

I'm seeing from one of your earlier posts, https://www.reddit.com/r/cprogramming/comments/1j3gd1t/gcc_and_wayland/, that you are likely newer to the Linux platform, so everything is probably still a bit overwhelming.

With time and a bit of effort on your part, you may get some more experience and be able to easily tell that the absence of the file-heif plug-in in the snap package was due to the snap package maintainers' build environment not having the dependency for that, namely libheif-dev.

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u/Sandy_W 3d ago

I use Linux. I won't claim to understand it, the way I understood DOS. Thank you for your help. Your pointer to Flatpak was the key to resolving this issue.

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u/ConversationWinter46 3d ago

You sound like you're stuck with Ubuntu. You have the free choice to install ANY other distribution.

With LinuxMint (which is based on Ubuntu, but there's no Snap compulsion) you're guaranteed not to have all these problems of Winbuntu.

About the HEIF/HEIC format: