4.5 HEIF Compression

Product Research & Development

• Use HEIF raster images for Apple Books
  • See the Apple Books Demo
• Use HEIF raster images for xyz tile servers

iOS Support HEIF

For iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra Apple introduced support for these new, industry-standard media formats:

• HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) for photos
• HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), also known as H.265, for videos
• See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207022

HEIF and HEVC offer better compression than JPEG and H.264, so they use less storage space on your devices and iCloud Photos, while preserving the same visual quality.

When generating an Atlas of Topo or Satellite images, it may be worthwhile to see if HEIF compression is useful for your application.

Comparison of File Sizes for Topographic (HEIF vs. PNG)

Comparison of HEIF for Topographic & Orthographic Rasters.

Comparison of File Sizes for Orthographic (HEIF vs. PNG)