Evernote does NOT support iPhone 11 (.HEIC Photos)

[RichW 15]

Come on guys.  I'm an ex-Evernote employee (exec) and we would have NEVER have let a new iPhone come out in the Libin years and not support the native photo format (.HEIC).  That is just crazy and you have had plenty of time to get this done.  Why?  Our whole family has iPhones and this really just makes Evernote not usable anymore. 

It is just insane to expect your tens of millions of customers to convert the format of every photo they take so they can see it in Evernote.  Are you TRYING to drive away your customers?  I just don't get it.  Please explain your logic here.

[RichW 15]

No, this is not a Windows issue. I can take photos on an iPhone 10 or 11, airdrop it to my Mac, drop Them into Evernote and Evernote will not display the image because it is in HEIC format.  It just shows question marks.  

This is because EVERNOTE does not support HEIC, the standard format for iPhone today. Search the Evernote forums. This is a known issue and they have been ignoring it for a long time.  As a past Evernote exec, I can’t for the life of me understand why that decision would make sense.  Are they dropping support for Apple?  
 

That is not how we built Evernote to get to a 100M daily active users.  We supported everything before it came out and our customers loved us for it. 

[PinkElephant 5,549]

Sad as it is, currently the number of programs and OSes that ignore HEIC is far larger than those who support it. Somebody mentioned Windows, to start with ?! No native support, need to download additional apps to handle the pics.

Inside of the Apple ecosystem, you get the benefits, but outside you pay a price. As far as I remember it was not introduced with the iPhone 11, but because it can store additional information to the image data itself, you benefit more from using it when operating an advanced camera system.

By the way, HEIC was not created by Apple, it is a worldwide neutral standard that was designed to get rid of some of the deficiencies of JPEG.

The JPEG standard dates back to the days when you saved the images on a floppy disk drive build into the camera. To save one ( 1 ) picture from a modern camera, several of these disks would be needed ... thus JPEG is based on compression, and it uses a simple, destructive algorithm to do that.

Anyhow, you got my vote on this.

[gazumped 9,824]

Hmmn. The HEIC (HEIF) format was developed (it says here) as an improvement on JPG - same quality but half the size,  and -amongst other things- it supports multiple images and transparencies in one file.

Wish my (Android) phone took that sort of image!  But you know,  we're a -mainly- user-supported Forum here,  and Evernote staffers -usually- don't comment on issues such as this,  so your guess is probably better than mine as to whether and when support for this new(ish) format will be introduced.  I doubt any explanations will be forthcoming,  but maybe the fact that the Big E is harmonising the product across most (all?) platforms and they've got some deep coding to do to glue a new UI together could explain the delay on new features.  I voted too.  

[PinkElephant 5,549]

HEIC is often described as an improvement of JPG, but it is a replacement. It uses a completely different compression algorithm that is not creating the fractal artifacts found on JPGs. And it uses 10bits instead of 8 to define the brightness of each color of a pixel, which avoids the "burned out" or "lost in black" areas found on JPGs.

Furthermore for pictures taken on multiple camera devices like the new iPhones (or many Android phones), the HEIC picture contains the information about which part of the picture was how far away from the camera. This is never saved in a JPG.

It was thought to replace the JPGs as the new standard, but up to now the main promoter is Apple. Even dedicated Photo editing software like Affinity Photo does not "know" it.

Others are more advanced: I am running GraphicsConverter on my Mac. They know HEIC, can handle it, and even use the depth information (if available) to blur the background creating a bokeh-effect in post processing, like portrait mode on the iPhone does. Pretty slick !

[Joe Pairman 19]

I don’t have any problem inserting images from my iPhone photo library (no obvious conversion required unless it’s happening automatically). And I just checked my settings — I’m capturing “high efficiency” images which I believe is the setting for HEIC. What is it that people can’t do? On which model of iPhone? (iPhone 7 still here.)

 

Edit: are we talking about viewing HEIC in Windows, per this thread?

Edited January 10, 2020 by Joe Pairman

[PinkElephant 5,549]

Yes, we were talking mostly about Windows. There HEIC is natively not supported.

The OSes developed by Apple (MacOS, iOS) natively support HEIC, and lend this capability to other programs running on these platforms. But even there, some Programs will not support HEIC. For example Affinity Photo (which in general is a very capable Program) does not support HEIC export. GraphicConverter does, but on import HEIC-Fotos are auto converted into JPG.

In case of EN, when I just tried, a HEIC was auto converted into JPG when I send it into a new note. So as long as you keep pictures in the camera roll, HEIC is preserved. But if you save them into EN, it seems they are converted. If this is done by the OS or by EN I can't tell.

[PinkElephant 5,549]

Yesterday I tried it out before posting: Taking a HEIC from the Photos App on my MacBook Pro / Catalina and drag & drop it into an EN note. The picture was transferred and showed, but I think it was converted into a JPEG on the transfer (no way to look this up in EN, at least I could not see it). When I exported it out of EN it showed as a JPEG.

So I think this background conversion happened on the OS level, not by EN.

1st as as user of nearly exclusively Apple-devices for sure I would like to have HEIC supported in EN.

2nd EN is not alone in the club of those programs that doesn’t - among them dedicated Photo editing programs. Maybe the iPhone  camera was not regarded as a source for real photography - which probably changed now with the iPhone 11, that has a fantastic set of cameras. I often take pictures in RAW using Halide, which allows for post processing an iPhone picture like one from a DSLR. HEIC would make this easier, avoiding RAW.

About what to support everybody can make his own priority list. For me getting a better iOS app (more like desktop) would be number one, with features like merging notes, selecting and modifying several notes at once (tagging, table of content, presentation mode etc.), plus split mode to have 2 EN sessions open.

The course of management to cut back on having multiple UIs, different functionality and to get a more unified engine to drive EN on the different platforms for me sounds good. With to many peeks and perks you probably get a platform that will be very hard to support on the long run. Most of the OSes run an update cycle of one major update per year. This makes 4 OS updates every year, plus the permanent browser updates. This alone is enough to keep a lot of software engineers busy. Sometimes keeping it simple is doing it better.

[Aart 1]

Wow I just came here by Google.. very surprised to see this too. Interesting fact: OneNote does support it.

[Maan 0]

It’s almost november and still no reply from Evernote yet, i can see..... Wow!

[logam11 8]

@RichW is the voice of reason! I was shocked as a 7 year user of Evernote to discover today that HEIC is not supported. Completely unacceptable!

[Coolohoh 2]

Arghs seriously, please support HEIC already! Sometimes adding images from my iOS evernote works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it works, but when I copy the image to another note, it shows up as an attachment instead of an image. It's frustrating as hell! 

[PinkElephant 5,549]

HEIC is an Apple-only party. If you want notes that work on all devices, you need to avoid this format, or convert pictures to JPG or PNG before sending them into EN.

You can use several apps to do so, or create a iOS shortcut to do the job. Even when some of the formats are quite outdated, JPG, GIF and PNG are those that work on all devices.