High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF)

High Efficiency Image Format or HEIF is the image format introduced by Apple, Inc. in OS 11.

The format was first released in 2015 by the developers of MPEG.

HEIF uses a 16-bit deep color and it is on average 2x smaller than JPEG.

HEIF introduces a modern compression technique that stores images in smaller sizes, but able to retain the high definition quality of JPEG. The format is more flexible, it can store either a single image or image sequences.