HEIF support should be installed by default

[Éric Piel]

The HEIF image file format [1] is getting quite popular, mainly because this is now the default image format for iOS [2]. Unfortunately, this is not supported by default in Ubuntu (20.04). In practice, this means that if someone sends you a picture from an iPhone, you won't be able to look at it (and the error message in eog is just saying this "is not a image", not hinting at all that installing a small package could solve it).

Therefore, I'd recommend installing by default the following two extra packages. This is about 60kB:
heif-gdk-pixbuf
heif-thumbnailer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format
[2] https://www.imyfone.com/phone-data-transfer/what-is-iphone-heic/

[Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131)]

heif-gdk-pixbuf uses and depends on libheif, but this doesn't seem like a bug in libheif.

You probably should change the affected package to eog.
In other words, eog should depend on or recommend one of heif-gdk-pixbuf, heif-thumbnailer.

[Joachim Bauch (fancycode)]

Assigning to eog as per comment #1.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

I think heif-gdk-pixbuf package should be recommended by ubuntu-desktop or ubuntu-desktop-minimal metapackages, because HEIF (.HEIC ) pictures are very popular in these days and not all people keep eog viewer installed ;)

also we should patch org.gnome.eog.desktop file to add "image/heif;" to MimeType=

[Aaron Lichtman (alichtman)]

@mantas: I made the metapackage changes you mentioned here: https://git.launchpad.net/~alichtman/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-meta/commit/?id=c67add66d28fd38cddfcdd9798339f8040b6589c

I opened a MR here: https://code.launchpad.net/~alichtman/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-meta/+git/ubuntu-meta/+merge/442067. I'm not really sure if it's targeting the right destination branch. It's my first ubuntu contribution.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "0001-Add-HEIF-HEIC-support-by-default-on-desktop.patch" seems to be a debdiff. The ubuntu-sponsors team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review and hopefully sponsor the debdiff. If the attachment isn't a patch, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are member of the ~ubuntu-sponsors, unsubscribe the team.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issue please contact him.]

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

This is blocked on bug #1827442.

I also disagree with seeding this directly; we also install webp-pixbuf-loader by default, and it is pulled in by:

$ reverse-depends webp-pixbuf-loader -c main
Reverse-Depends
===============
* eog
* gnome-control-center
* shotwell

Packages without architectures listed are reverse-dependencies in: amd64, arm64, armhf, ppc64el, s390x
$

It is not seeded directly. I think having heif-* as a dependency of these other packages would also be what we want.

Anyway, I am marking this bug as 'wontfix' based on the state of the MIR for the libheif source package. Feel free to subscribe to that bug, and if and when that bug is resolved, reopen this bug and resubscribe ubuntu-sponsors.