Convert .heic to .jpg via the terminal

Running Linux and working in Cloud and HPC it is common for me to be stumped when problems appear. Indeed that is where the fun is. However, after receiving a link to download some photos from a recent even, I was shocked to see the images were in .heicformat.¹ I have never heard of this and was shocked that something as simple as an image file could not be opened easily on my fancy, sleek, XPS-13.

So below is how I converted these images into .jpg.

First install libheif-examples from the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libheif-examples

You can then run the below command to convert an input into and output jpg. Obviously change the file names in the below example to reflect. ²

heif-convert input.heic output.jpg

I’m sure, however, that you don’t have just one file - you might have a folder full of images. In that case you can create a script in the same folder as your images

touch  convert_all_heif_to_jpg.sh

and paste: ³

#!/bin/bash

# Directory containing HEIF files
input_dir="."

# Loop through all HEIF files in the directory
for file in "$input_dir"/*.heic; do # Check that this is the right extention! 
    # Check if any HEIF files exist
    if [ -e "$file" ]; then
        # Get the base name of the file (without extension)
        base_name=$(basename "$file" .heif)

        # Convert HEIF to JPEG
        heif-convert "$file" "$input_dir/$base_name.jpg"

        # Optional: Remove additional files created by heif-convert
        find "$input_dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f ! -name "$base_name.heif" ! -name "$base_name.jpg" -name "$base_name*" -exec rm -f {} +
    fi
done

echo "Conversion completed."

Make the script executable with the below:

chmod +x convert_all_heif_to_jpg.sh

and run it!

./convert_all_heif_to_jpg.sh

That should do it! Enjoy your photos!

I’m no expert but heic and heif are similar formats - you will see both used interchangeably here. ↩
No idea why this command creates a bunch of extra files, not just a .jpg, for single files this is not a problem and you can just delete them. For the longer script I’ve added the ability to delete all but the wanted .jpeg. ↩
Please note, this script can convert .heif files to, just change the change line 5 to reflect which format you have. In this instance it is .heic not .heif. ↩

Footnotes