HEIF/HEIC support in Kubuntu 21.04

Solution 1:

HEIF plug-in is included in kimageformats package but package maintainer has to explicitly enable it (use cmake with -DKIMAGEFORMATS_HEIF=ON). Otherwise the plug-in will not be built/installed (check if you have kimg_heif.so).

The plug-in needs libheif>=1.10.0 build with libde265 support.

If you have the kimg_heif.so installed, you can modify following file to enable HEIF/HEIC thumbnails:

/usr/share/kservices5/imagethumbnail.desktop

add image/heif to the line which begins with MimeType=

Solution 2:

Unfortunately, HEIF images are still not supported in KDE Plasma / Gwenview as of Kubuntu 21.10 (and even Plasma 5.23 from the backports ppa), because the package kimageformat-plugins is compiled without HEIF support by default.

I just managed to view HEIF images in Gwenview by recompiling the kimageformat-plugins package (I'm not a DEB expert, it is the first time I recompiled a DEB package, so please correct me if I'm doing something wrong, but it did work for me tonight):

1. Make sure deb-src lines are enabled /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubuntu-ppa-ubuntu-backports.list (if you use the backports ppa with the latest KDE software)

2. Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential devscripts
sudo apt build-dep kimageformat-plugins
sudo apt install libheif-dev

3. Create a directory somewhere, pull the package source into it and cd into the source directory kimageformats-5.xx.x within the new directory:

mkdir kimageformats-build
cd kimageformats-build
apt source kimageformat-plugins
cd kimageformats-5.*

4. Edit the file CMakeLists.txt in this directory: In the line which says option(KIMAGEFORMATS_HEIF "Enable plugin for HEIF format" OFF) change OFF to ON

5. Rebuild the package with debuild -us -uc -b

6. Go into the parent directory (cd ..), there should be new .deb file called something like kimageformat-plugins_5.xx.**.deb (in my case today it was kimageformat-plugins_5.88.0-0ubuntu1~ubuntu21.10~ppa1_amd64.deb). Install that package by sudo apt install --reinstall ./kimageformat-plugins_5.*.deb

7. As @user1421503 said in his answer: Edit /usr/share/kservices5/imagethumbnail.desktop and add image/heif to the line which begins with MimeType=

Enjoy viewing your iPhone images in Gwenview!