Although 17% market share of iPhone and its default image format HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) which is occupying less space for arguably same quality images; we still don’t have proper support for HEIF/HEIC/HEIVC in any of the operating systems except Mac OS X and its weird Photos app which is extremely user unfriendly.

I’ve found Viewnior which is able to open them and quicker than opening GIMP every time.

For command line interface, you can use libheif

# For viewing
sudo pacman -S viewnior

# For CLI tools for dealing with HEIF HEIC formatted images and videos through terminal.
# eg. bulk convert them etc.
sudo pacman -S libheif

# Now let's use it.
heif-convert image.heic image.jpg

# OR, good old ffmpeg
ffmpeg -i image.heic image.jpg

I’ve still not found a method to generate the thumbnails automatically though. I pulled this off in Ubuntu but tumbler or heifthumbnailer etc are not working. Let’s see.