Frequently Asked Questions
Can you explain what the plugin does? Does it convert HEIC files to JPG on the file system? Or does it only convert them "on the fly" so that they can be viewed as thumbnails in slideshows?
The plug-in behavior is defined by Picapport: when Picapport finds a file that it cannot manage, if a plug-in exists that supports such file format, Picapport will invoke the plug-in asking the plug-in to convert the file to JPEG. Then Picapport will save the JPEG to disk, create thumbnails, etc. etc. When you are browsing the pictures through the plug-in UI, Picapport will use the JPEG, and if you click on a picture when viewing it, Picapport will show a popup menu which includes the option to download the original HEIC picture.
In other words, on the drive you will have both the HEIC image and the converted JPEG, side by side, just with a different file name. Conversion "on-the-fly" is not supported by Picapport at the moment. Plus, based on my experience implementing the plug-in, the conversion of a large photo from HEIC to JPEG takes seconds on typical NAS hardware, so conversion on-the-fly would largely impact usability unless Picapport would be running on a dedicated high-end machine, which I believe is not the case for most users.
As such usage of this plug-in (or any other image plug-in for Picapport) could be seen as a waste of space, especially considering that HEIC is much more efficient than JPEG.
Personally, I like the idea of shooting pictures in HEIC format because this saves storage on my iPhone, while and I don't mind the wasted space on my NAS because the storage used by my NAS is cheap.
Also, while it's true that one can configure iPhone to save pictures as JPEG rather than HEIC, this change would apply only to new pictures, and this plug-in can still be useful to view on Picapport all HEIC pictures shot before changing the iPhone configuration.
ImageMagick is a command-line Unix/Linux program for manipulating images. It can perform several transformations including, but not limited to, format conversion, resizing, black and white and many more. It's been ported to many operating systems, for example it can be installed on MacOS using brew. As there is no freely available Java library for converting HEIC to JPEG, this plug-in uses ImageMagick for conversion. Essentially, the plug-in invokes the ImageMagick executable through the Java library im4java.
The plug-in allows Picapport to manage HEIC pictures already on its hard-drive but it does not change the behavior of the Picapport mobile App, which means that your iPhone pictures in HEIC format won't be uploaded by the App after installing the plug-in on Picapport server. But, if you find any other means to transfer your HEIC pictures to Picapport server, then Picapport will be able to use them. Following a suggestion by the Picapport authors, I am using WebDAV support in Picapport to do so, and the iPhone app WebDAV Nav+ to automatically sync photos on my iPhone with Picapport.