Why are iMessage photos sent as JPEG instead of HEIC after updating to iOS 18.4?

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Why are iMessage photos sent as JPEG instead of HEIC after updating to iOS 18.4?

Hi, my wife and I have our phones set to use High Efficiency photos and we have always been able to send photos to each other as HEIF using IMessage. We updated our phones a few days ago from IOS 17 to IOS 18.4 and now all photos we send to each other are coming through as JPEG. We have not changed any settings and have checked and they all look correct. I may be wrong but I thought that photos sent to other iPhone users would be sent as HEIF and they would only be converted to JPEG when sending to non-iPhone users. I look at the photo in my photos and it is HEIF. I send it using IMessage. My wife receives the message and saves it to photos. She looks in her photos and it is JPEG. We are currently using iPhone 14 and have been using iPhones for years.

Would really appreciate some advice on this. Thank you very much indeed

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Posted on Apr 15, 2025 1:46 AM

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Answer 1

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MT1203 Author

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Apr 16, 2025 12:24 PM in response to MT1203

Hi, i think I have got to the bottom of this. My wife and I also have an Apple watch which was running an older version of IOS. We updated the watches to the latest IOS and the photos have started correctly transferring as HEIF again. I don’t know if this is correct but I read elsewhere that Apple had made a change to something relating to the HEIC format in IOS 18 and I wonder if the watch needed the update to be able to display the updated format? I wonder if the phone was converting received files to JPEG for compatibility with the watch? It’s only a hunch so might be wrong but updating the watches is the only thing we have done and it is all working fine now. Hopefully this might be of use to others having the same problem.

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Answer 2

MT1203 Author

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Apr 15, 2025 5:47 AM in response to MT1203

Hi, I have done some further testing with a friend who has an iPhone Xs running IOS 17.7. This works fine. If I send them an iMessage with a photo attached it is received as HEIF. Likewise, if they send me a photo via iMessage then I also receive it as HEIF. It seems that something has changed in IOS 18.4?

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Why are iMessage photos sent as JPEG instead of HEIC after updating to iOS 18.4?

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