SUMMARY Gwenview is unable to display .HEIC images, even after having installed appropriate libraries such as "heif-gdk-pixbuf" in debian. Eye of gnome opens the images just fine as long as the heif libraries are installed. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Create some .HEIC images. 2. In debian/ubuntu, install "heif-gdk-pixbuf". 3. Try to open the .HEIC images with gwenview. 4. After failing to render the images, open them with eye of gnome and notice that they display just fine. OBSERVED RESULT Gwenview does not open the image ("Loading <image name> failed. Gwenview cannot display"). EXPECTED RESULT Gwenview should open the image. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.3 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.90.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 Kernel Version: 5.16.0-5-amd64 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Eight-Core Processor Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD VEGA10
heif-gdk-pixbuf is a GdkPixbuf plugin, so it will work for GTK apps (e.g. Eye of GNOME) but it will not work for Qt apps (e.g. Gwenview). kimageformats includes a Qt plugin for HEIF, however on Debian / Ubuntu it is not built with HEIF support. [1] You can rebuild kimageformats with HEIF support, or try qt-heic-image-plugin. [2] [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kimageformats/+bug/1951278 [2] https://github.com/novomesk/qt-heic-image-plugin
I encountered the same issue on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Installing libheif1 from Packman fixed the issue for me: https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1213371 Could Dolphin & Gwenview show a button to install the necessary package for various distros through PackageKit? Since the format is patent-encumbered, this might affect quite a few distros.