I’ve seen lots of tutorials online explaining how to convert iOS HEIC files to JPEGs but I can’t seem to find any easy way to bulk convert existing JPEG photos to HEIC?
The reason being is I really like HEIC as a storage format: It easily makes image file sizes 5x to 10x smaller than JPEG equivalents which not only saves space but makes syncing the library to other devices quicker as well.
So I would like to convert all past images in my macOS Photo library to HEIC two take advantage of these benefits. Do any such tools exist?
While I understand how to bulk convert images outside of macOS Photos using ImageMagick and simple Bash scripting, I would like to avoid doing a bulk export, conversion via non-Photos tools and then reimport because that seems messy at best.
I mean Apple is really promoting the use of HEIC within their apps nowadays; why not have some way to easily do that within the macOS Photos application itself?
Best Answer
Unless somebody writes a plugin to manipulate photos in place, converting all the JPGs outside of Photos, deleting them from the library and then reimporting seems to be the only way. Which of course means that you loose all the albums etc.
As for a plugin, I wouln't be surprised if this is nearly impossible to do as plugins usually manipulate just the content of a photo, they change neither file type nor file name. And with the in-place editing Photos provides (and the versioning/edit history this requires) even a hack accessing
photos.dbdirectly will be challenging to do.