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Should I convert my JPEGs to HEIF files?
Although I keep Raw images taken with my camera, my Mac has tens of thousands of JPEGs made from them. Could I save space by converting them to High Sierra’s HEIF?
Probably, but don’t commit much time or effort to doing so just yet. Although High Sierra and iOS 11 introduce support for high-efficiency formats for still images (HEIF) and video (HEVC), support is limited at present, and they may yet change.
The initial releases of High Sierra don’t include any tools for creating HEIF files, and most third-party apps that work with images can’t save to the new format. You can open HEIF images in Preview, and save them as JPEG, PNG, and other formats, but if you can’t readily transcode from older formats into HEIF, then your proposal won’t work.
Third-party tools that can write to the new formats are based on the open source FFmpeg tool, which you can use directly in Terminal if you wish. Since this works in Sierra and older versions of macOS, you don’t need High Sierra for conversion, though that makes viewing and decoding much easier.
You could
