How to work with HEIC image file types in Python

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.