Due to the issue of the Packman project and repository planning to be discontinued at the end of this year, I began looking into the possibility of building “libheif” privately and stumbled across the following in the source of the package in the Packman Repository → <https://github.com/strukturag/libheif>
Project status (August 2026). libheif and libde265 are maintained by a single independent developer with almost no recurring funding, while 37 security advisories had to be investigated, fixed and released in 2026 alone. If libheif is part of your product or service, please read Funding and Commercial support. Security issues are reported as described in SECURITY.md.
Software using libheif
libheif is the HEIF/AVIF implementation behind most open-source image software. Because ImageMagick, libvips, GDAL and the desktop image loaders depend on it, it is also used indirectly by a large number of web services, content management systems and image processing pipelines built on these libraries.
- GIMP
- Krita
- ImageMagick
- GraphicsMagick
- darktable
- digiKam 7.0.0
- libvips and sharp (Node.js)
- pillow-heif (Python / Pillow)
- kImageFormats
- GNOME desktop (through the gdk-pixbuf loader included in libheif)
- libGD
- Kodi HEIF image decoder plugin
- bimg
- GDAL
- OpenImageIO
- XnView
<https://github.com/strukturag/libheif#software-using-libheif>
There’s also this: <Funding>
The GitHub site does, however, indicate that, the “libheif” project has 118 contributors.
Given the information related to HEIF in <Wikipedia> and, also here → <Nokia>, I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that –
- In the short term we’ll have to compile the HEIC codecs ourselves.
- The legal (patent) issues around HEIC Video support are well documented but, for non-video HEIC images, AFAICS, there seem to be no patents which could cause legal problems.
- We’ll have to hope that, the Struktur AG can resolve the funding problems around the CVE changes needed to the “libheif” source code.
- I don’t understand why the “libheif” packages in the openSUSE repositories are unusable for the display of non-video camera images.
Until I get the “libheif” private build sorted out, my Android 16 mobile telephone and Apple MacBook will remain as my only possibility to view HEIF files.