(Lack of) Sony HEIF support

It took over a year for Apple to add RAW image support for the Sony A1 camera, but we’re coming up on two years now and there still isn’t full support for HEIF images from that same camera.

Ventura 13.1, iPadOS 16.2, iOS 16.2

Sony HEIF photos imported on the Mac sync and appear in the iCloud photo libraries on the iPhone and iPad.

These photos can be edited and saved on the Mac, but the image then presents the “exclamation point cloud” icon in the lower right stating there’s an error and the higher quality version of the image can’t be downloaded — even though the original photo is stored locally on the Mac (which appears to be a known issue). Edits don’t show on other devices.

These photos can also be edited on iPhone/iPad, but it’s liable to crash the Photos app when the edits are saved. If Photos doesn’t crash, edits made on the iPhone will sync to the iPad and vice versa. These edits do not sync to the Mac. It’s possible the sporadic crashes are due to the 50MP image size and not the file format.

One of the reasons I got the A1 was to be able to use HEIF format when doing casual photography for the quality and filesize improvements over JPEG, but two years in and Apple remains the sticking point.