How To Work With HEIC Image File Types In Python

The High Efficiency Image File (HEIF) format is the default when airdropping an image from an iPhone to a OSX device. I want to edit and modify these .HEIC files with Python. I co

Solution 1:

You guys should check out this library, it's a Python 3 wrapper to the libheif library, it should serve your purpose of file conversion, extracting metadata:

https://github.com/david-poirier-csn/pyheif

https://pypi.org/project/pyheif/

Example usage:

 import io

 import whatimage
 import pyheif
 from PIL import Image


 def decodeImage(bytesIo):

    fmt = whatimage.identify_image(bytesIo)
    if fmt in ['heic', 'avif']:
         i = pyheif.read_heif(bytesIo)

         # Extract metadata etc
         for metadata in i.metadata or []:
             if metadata['type']=='Exif':
                 # do whatever
        
         # Convert to other file format like jpeg
         s = io.BytesIO()
         pi = Image.frombytes(
                mode=i.mode, size=i.size, data=i.data)

         pi.save(s, format="jpeg")

  ...

Solution 2:

I was quite successful with Wand package : Install Wand: https://docs.wand-py.org/en/0.6.4/ Code for conversion:

   from wand.image import Image
   import os

   SourceFolder="K:/HeicFolder"
   TargetFolder="K:/JpgFolder"

   for file in os.listdir(SourceFolder):
      SourceFile=SourceFolder + "/" + file
      TargetFile=TargetFolder + "/" + file.replace(".HEIC",".JPG")
    
      img=Image(filename=SourceFile)
      img.format='jpg'
      img.save(filename=TargetFile)
      img.close()

Solution 3:

Adding to the answer by danial, i just had to modify the byte array slighly to get a valid datastream for further work. The first 6 bytes are 'Exif\x00\x00' .. dropping these will give you a raw format that you can pipe into any image processing tool.

import pyheif
import PIL
import exifread

def read_heic(path: str):
    with open(path, 'rb') as file:
        image = pyheif.read_heif(file)
        for metadata in image.metadata or []:
            if metadata['type'] == 'Exif':
                fstream = io.BytesIO(metadata['data'][6:])

    # now just convert to jpeg
    pi = PIL.Image.open(fstream)
    pi.save("file.jpg", "JPEG")

    # or do EXIF processing with exifread
    tags = exifread.process_file(fstream)

At least this worked for me.

Solution 4:

This will do go get the exif data from the heic file

import pyheif
import exifread
import io

heif_file = pyheif.read_heif("file.heic")

for metadata in heif_file.metadata:

    if metadata['type'] == 'Exif':
        fstream = io.BytesIO(metadata['data'][6:])

    exifdata = exifread.process_file(fstream,details=False)

    # example to get device model from heic file
    model = str(exifdata.get("Image Model"))
    print(model)

Solution 5:

Consider using PIL in conjunction with pillow-heif:

pip3 install pillow-heif

from PIL import Image
from pillow_heif import register_heif_opener

register_heif_opener()

image = Image.open('image.heic')