Reading HEIC files does not work for iPhone images.

[adamsiembida]

The release notes for v0.27.4 list HEIC support, and the manual lists read support. However, when I try to read an HEIC image from an iPhone, I get a "The file contains data of an unknown image type" error.

[kmilos]

It might be that your 0.27.4 binary package was built w/o BMFF support. You can check that by running exiv2 -Vv and looking for enable_bmff.

[adamsiembida]

It might be that your 0.27.4 binary package was built w/o BMFF support. You can check that by running exiv2 -Vv and looking for enable_bmff.

You are right, the binary has enable_bmff=0. I wonder if the website should be more clear that the official binaries it is distributing have some of the stated features excluded.

[clanmills]

The pre-built binaries on exiv2.org have enable_bmff=1 for macOS, Cygwin/64, MinGW/msys2 and linux (ubuntu). I'm rather surprised that the MSVC build has enable_bmff=0. Clearly a little bug in the build.sh script which was updated for v0.27.4. I'll fix that when I build Exiv2 v0.27.5 RC3 later this week.

I have never investigated how platform package managers (apt, yum, pacman etc) build exiv2. The default for all 0.27 builds is -DEXIV2_ENABLE_BMFF=0. This will be changed to =1 for v1.00. Assuming that the package manager uses the defaults, the build will be -DEXIV2_ENABLE_BMFF=0. The default rationale is documented in the Wiki: https://github.com/Exiv2/exiv2/wiki/BMFF-Legals

[kmilos]

I have never investigated how platform package managers (apt, yum, pacman etc) build exiv2.

This is really up to each individual maintainer of the package recipe and the distribution/repository policies, availability of dependencies, etc. E.g. the jury is still out for Fedora packages...

Example recipes:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/exiv2/blob/rawhide/f/exiv2.spec#_77
https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/7b446f5f3f8eeb25b9b2171a23cf93df4fac2221/trunk/PKGBUILD#L26
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/5589dd94fdb368438325471fb638d0a85bae37da/Formula/exiv2.rb#L30

[clanmills]

Thanks, @kmilos. When I think about it, we want the packages to use the defaults when building exiv2. So, -DEXIV2_ENABLE_BMFF=0 is correct. The message "unknown image type" isn't very helpful in this situation.

I want to avoid changing code when we plan to publish RC3 this week. It would have been better to have a new error "bmff not supported in this build". That's non-trivial as we would require sufficient bmff code compiled to detect the format.

I'm home from vacation and have fixed build.sh to set -DEXIV2_ENABLE_BMFF=1, so on track for RC3 on Friday.