The evil of HEIF

Picture the scene. You’ve just bought yourself an expensive Windows 10 powered computer. You’ve got it going and find the experience smooth and hassle free. You’ve put the wonderful OneDrive application on your iPhone and you decide to view some of the pictures you took with your iPhone on you shiny new computer.

And they look horrible. Finally, after a bit of searching on the internet you discover that to fix this you have to go into the Settings page for the Photos app and follow a link to install the “HEIF media extensions”.

Then you find out that the extension costs 79 pence. Just so you can view pictures that you took with your phone. At this point you’d probably be getting a bit cross with Microsoft who seem to be rather desperate for your money. I suppose it is a tiny amount of money, but that is really the point. I wonder how much Microsoft makes from this, and whether it is worth the damage to customer goodwill.

Oh well, I’ve just had to do this for my newly imaged PC. I must have installed a free solution last time. The strange thing is that I don’t remember doing it for any of my Surface devices….