pictures in .heic are not shown in desktop app

[Tupsi]

Steps to reproduce

1. make a photo with a modern android smartphone which saves pictures in .heic instead of jpg. (I used a Samsung S20)
2. share the taken picture in a matrix room with the android app.
3. The picture is shown fine in the android app.
4. the desktop app just shows a loading animation.

5. downloading the picture and later open it in any viewer works fine and shows the taken photo (I used IrfanView)

Outcome

What did you expect?

shared picture shown in the room like any other image shared

What happened instead?

never ending loading animation

Operating system

Windows

Application version

Element version 1.10.4, Olm version 3.2.8

How did you install the app?

can't remember, it is been a while

Homeserver

Synapse 1.52.0

Will you send logs?

No

[t3chguy]

No browsers support HEIC/HEIF at this time, Element Desktop is an Electron app which uses Chromium
https://caniuse.com/heif

[t3chguy]

Two prior issues on this topic have been closed

#19531 (comment)
#9143 (comment)

Closing alike

[justin13888]

I've been having this issue for years and always ended up inconveniently going to my phone to view it. I've seen quite a few people post an issue about it and I do think it's worth finding a solution to this. Instead of relying the chromium engine to support heic/heif (which may take many more years), what if we just allow element desktop applications to convert the heic/heif file into a commonly supported format and cache it to be viewed?

I understand if there are many other more critical issues to solve, but I'd be willing to implement a PR to test that out. Reason I'm also writing this here is because I'd like to welcome input from anybody on this, especially on the technical implementation.

[ajkessel]

I agree with @justin13888 . This is basic functionality that normal users expect to work -- if a Mac user pastes an image into a chat on the desktop app, they expect other room members to be able to view it. There are off-the-shelf free libraries that convert HEIC to JPEG, so it shouldn't be that heavy a lift to integrate into Element. Would love to see this get fixed.

[ajkessel]

A short-term workaround: maubot-hateheif