This post is completely out of the norm of what I usually write about, but wanted to document a workflow that I use fairly regularly when uploading photos to my computer.
With the rollout of iOS 11, I’ve noticed that if I airdrop photos from my iPhone to my Mac, the photos will drop in on my desktop as .HEIC files. It’s not all the time, so I’m not sure if its a random setting on my phone that I could change, and I’ve honestly been too lazy to dig into it. But at the point that it hits my desktop as an .HEIC file, I know I won’t be able to upload it to my blog, for example, since this is the error that’s returned:
If you Google how to covert files from .HEIC to .jpg or .png, there are all these online, free ‘conversion tools’ which makes me irrationally annoyed. I want to convert these myself, dammit! So I figured out how to set up a Quick Action on my Mac that will do the converting without having to pop my photos into any sort of online conversion thing.
1.Search for the Automator on your computer. Open it up and click New Document.
2. Select Quick Action, then select Choose.
3. Search Copy in the top left search bar, then select and drag Copy Finder Items to the empty space on the right:
4. You’ll now have the option to choose where you want converted images to be saved. I’m usually working right on my desktop and like to file them later, so for now I’ll leave mine as the Desktop folder. I’m also going to check the box called Replacing Existing Files because I don’t want to create a copy of the .HEIC file, I just want to replace it with the .jpg file.
5. Next, we’re going to search for another action on the left-hand search bar. Search Change Type, then select and drag Change Type of Images over to the right blank space (beneath Copy Finder Items):
6. In the Change Type of Images box that appears, click the dropdown menu and select JPEG.
7. Finally, we want to name our Quick Action and save it as a workflow. From the Automator window, click File → Save, and name your action to something like Convert to JPG. Then click Save.
Boom! Now let’s test it out. Right click on your .HEIC image, hover your mouse over Quick Actions, and then select your newly created Action:
Voilà!
This is one of those things that has bugged me enough to be annoyed but not enough to search how to fix. But that was super simple to setup so thank you!