Editorial policy

Everything on heic.fyi is written by the heic.fyi team. HEIC and HEIF attract a lot of confident but outdated or simply wrong advice — about browser support, Windows codecs, what conversion preserves, what "removing metadata" actually removes. This page explains the rules we follow so that our pages are not another source of it.

What we publish

• Tool pages describe what a tool does, how to use it and — in a section of its own — what it cannot do or changes about your file.
• Guides in Learn explain formats, compatibility and workflows.
• Troubleshooting pages help you work out why a file will not open and what to do about it.

How we research

1. Primary sources first. Standards (ISO/IEC 23008-12, ITU-T H.265), vendor documentation (Apple, Microsoft, Google), browser compatibility data and the source of the libraries we ship take priority over blog posts and forum answers.
2. Cite what we rely on. Sources we depend on are listed on the sources page, with the date we last checked them, and linked from the guides that use them.
3. Date everything that can go stale. Browser support, operating-system behaviour and store pricing change. Guides show when they were last updated, and we re-check time-sensitive claims when we revise them.
4. No unsourced numbers. A figure such as "30% smaller" appears only with a source or with the method we used to measure it.

How we test

• Tools run in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit during development, using valid files, damaged files, files with the wrong extension, oversized images and over-limit batches.
• Every output is re-opened and validated before a tool offers it, and a result that fails validation is reported as a failure rather than handed over.
• Where we publish measurements, we describe the test images, the settings and the software versions so the numbers can be reproduced.
• Our limits. We do not have camera-original files from every device. Where a feature has only been verified with generated or re-encoded files — depth maps and HDR gain maps are examples — the page says so. If you can help with real-world files, please tell us.

Independence

We do not accept payment for coverage, rankings or placement, and the site carries no advertising or affiliate links. Recommendations — for example which output format to pick — are based on what suits the task, not on what we would like you to click.

Updates and corrections

• Pages show a "last updated" date, and that date changes only when the content does.
• If you find an error, email hello@heic.fyi with the page, the sentence and, if possible, a source. We verify it and correct it promptly.
• Corrections that change what a reader would do are recorded with their date in the changelog, so you can see what changed and when.