What Image formats does the photos app support?

"Your photos and videos are stored in iCloud in their original format at full resolution. Formats include HEIF, JPEG, RAW, PNG, GIF, TIFF, HEVC and MP4,"

Set up and use iCloud Photos – Apple Support (UK)

It depends on the system version, which image formats and video formats are supported by Photos.

• The higher the system version, the more RAW formats are supported, for Big Sur see:Digital camera RAW formats supported by iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur - Apple Support
• The higher the system version, the less older legacy formats are supported. And I cannot import any PDF files since the upgrade to Catalina or Big Sur.

JPEGs, PNG, GIF, TIFF, HEIC are fine, but some of them cannot be imported, if they are having a third-party color sync profile assigned or are located on a volume with a problematic file system format, for example a case-sensitive format or a filesystem that is not MacOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS, or if the files are very large. When I try to import a TIFF with a side of 500 MB, Photos crashes.

jayanth100 wrote:

I mainly want to be able to import it on any device (Mac, iPhone or iPad), and have it sync with iCloud. Do all these formats work with that?

Keith already replied to this, The formats listed in the document cited by Keith generally will work with iCloud, as long as we do not use third party apps to edit the images. If the format is a container format like HEIF or HEVC, it will depend on the codecs of the items in the container, if we encounter problems in Photos, also if custom color sync profiles have been used.

When in doubt, create an empty new library for testing and try to import all photos and videos in small batches to this test library. Items that you cannot import on your current system version to Photos will need removing from your iCloud Photos Library. I had to remove and convert a lot of videos, also many of the Live Photos I had created with Into Live Pro from my video clips.

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Hi

At least jpg, tif and png. Probably most other common formats - if there is a specific one you're interested in, try it.

I'm guessing most proprietary formats of image editors are not. For example the afphoto format from Affinity isn't recognised.

For raw formats, this is the current list:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211241

JPG is from when windows could only handle 3 digit extensions. Remember 8.3?

I believe it can handle pdf, too.

Hi

Jpg is the most common, so use that. If you have an iPhone it will by default use HEIC - which gives smaller files for the same quality so saves space. So if you take pictures with an iPhone I would keep the HEIC format.

And yes, JPG and JPEG are the same, though in my experince JPG is more usual. Just some different apps use a different extension for the file. I have a mixture in my photos library (the JPEG files are ones that have been colourised from black and white. The colourizer app saved with the JPEG extension)