heic to png

Do you also share a small annoyance with .heic file types from iOS photos? Occassionally I’ll take timestamp photos of items I want to sell on Reddit. I would typically upload my images to imgur and then share that link to Reddit. However, imgur doesn’t support heic so I’m burdened with converting those heic images to png/jpg. I’ve used a few of the free convert image websites but decided to finally just build something I can run locally.

With that, I discovered MiniMagick, a ruby wrapper for ImageMagick. a few lines of code and voila!

require 'mini_magick'

heic_files = Dir.glob('*.{heic, HEIC}')
heic_files.each do |heic_file|
  output_png_file = File.basename(heic_file, '.*') + '.png'
  puts "Converting #{heic_file} to png..."
  MiniMagick::Tool::Convert.new do |convert|
    convert << heic_file
    convert << output_png_file
  end
  puts "Conversion complete!"
end

Taking it one step further, let’s make this tool available from anywhere in my shell. First I’ll configure an alias in my .zshrc config.

alias conv='ruby -/scripts/heic_to_png.rb'

Now I can run my conv command from my terminal in any directory and it will begin processing conversions!