Luma is designed to enable you open images in High Efficient Image Format (HEIF). Images in this format take twice less space on your device without any loss of image quality. Using this format will help you to save up to 50% of storage space for images.

HEIF is smaller and better
HEIF — or High Efficiency Image File Format — is the still-image version of the HVEC — or H.265 — video format. Its main advantage is that photos saved in HEIF are roughly half the size of JPEGs and of better quality. That means you can store twice as many photos on your phone before filling it up or looked at another way you can keep all the photos you have while freeing up a ton of gigabytes on your device!

HEIF is flexible
HEIF offers other advantages over JPEG. For starters it is not so much a file format as a container for files. A JPEG is a single image but a HEIF can be a single image or a sequence of images.

This makes HEIF perfect for Live Photos but also makes it a potential replacement for GIF. HEIF also supports transparency and image color up to 16 bits versus JPEG’s measly 8-bit color.

In practice this means that HEIF can capture all of the extended color range provided by the camera’s 10-bit color output. In other words you will no longer see ugly banding across a blue sky.

Photos will take up less space while looking better
They will upload and download much faster. And if the rest of the world adopts HEIF in place of JPEGs then the whole web will operate more quickly.

By making the move to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) we are getting ready for the future of media consumption and creation!

*For now Luma supports only one still image in HEIF format. Multi-image and video support will be added in next versions so keep updated!