I know about this trick for a long time but finally found some time to share it with you.

Story

Once I had to send a couple of pictures via e-mail (there were about 20 images). I am aware there are more efficient and smarter options to share images with other person, although sometimes the other side demands it to be an accually e-mail. 🙈🤷‍♂️

I decide to reduce the size, pack it and send it. I realized that images are stored in a strange Apple extension called *.heic, so this is not a desired extension that someone on the other side would like to see. Furthermore, the original images were big (3-5MB) and I really don’t want to end up with manually resizing and saving all images with desired extension.

Fortunately, there is a brilliant program called imagemagic which saves my ass a thousand times - and btw it’s actually now a group of different programs, but never mind.

With this tool, you can in a good well spirit of automation convert all images from HEIC to more popular JPEG and reduce the size (quality), so they can fit in a standard email size.

How-to

Install imagemagic on your computer (it’s free and available on all platforms). If you like my editing, especially the heic type of images, you may need to install an additional library called libheif. For other platforms use alternative.

brew install libheif imagemagick

Now you just need to specify a directory where your images are stored and execute the command:

magick mogrify -format jpg -quality 60 *.HEIC

Pay attention to the case sensitivity of the letters in the image extension, as it may be different than in my command.

You can also use instead full of magick mogrify ..., just mogrify ... because after the installation of imagemagic all its sub-programs should be available for you directly in the command line.

Yay! A few seconds later all images are converted and they’re ready for upload. Thanks, that’s all 🤘. Have fun further exploring imagemagic secrets. It’s definitely extremely helpful software.