Google Photos now supports iOS 11’s HEIF and HEVC camera formats

Google has updated its Photos app with support for iOS 11’s new camera formats for photos and videos. Google Photos is now compatible with High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) formats for images and audiovisual media, respectively.

The news comes from David Lieb, Google Photos’s Project Lead, who confirmed the HEIF/HEVC support for Google Photos for iOS on Twitter today.

Support for HEIF and HEVC is now launched

— David Lieb (@dflieb) September 7, 2017

HEIF and HEVC are ‘powerful new standards-based technologies’ for storing images and videos, and will be the native camera formats for images and videos on iOS 11. The notable feature of the new camera formats is that their compression is 2x better than what we have on iOS 10, meaning you’ll be able to capture lot more photos and videos within the same storage bandwidth. 9to5Mac’s Greg Barbosa has a better explanation on iOS 11’s new camera formats.

Since we’re less than a week away from the public launch of iOS 11, it’s quite obvious to see Google Photos adding support for this, as the firmware will hit millions of devices starting next week.