I got an iPhone 11 Pro about 18 months ago. I love the quality of the images. Low-light is still more amazing.
But the image file type is .HEIC. I have a recollection that Facebook didn't accept .HEIC at the time, when trying again now I find that it does. In any event, my workflow since then has included opening all the images up in Preview and manually exporting them to relatively low quality .jpg files, one by one.
I finally got tired of this.
I found a page where the guy shows how to set up the macOS Automator app to tell Preview to do the conversion. Some day I might try that. But it got me thinking.
I used trusty old Homebrew to install imagemagick. (It took a while, there are *a lot* of dependencies). Anyhow, so then I just cd to the Downloads directory and do this in Terminal:
magick convert -quality 10 IMG_9836.HEIC IMG_9836.jpg
It works great. I get a 10-fold compressed jpg compared to the original. So even if FB can now handle .HEIC I'm saving all that bandwidth on the upload.
The next problem was how to specify the new filenames for batch mode. One could use sed, but it's so awkward to read. Or I could always go to Python to bundle up the processes, but eventually I found a one-liner that works in Terminal:
for f in *.HEIC; do magick convert -quality 10 $f ${f:0:9.}jpg; done
The first filename is the source, like IMG_9836.HEIC. The second filename is ${f:0:9.}jpg, it extracts characters at specified positions from the string variable. I didn't know you could do this in the shell.
It's a hack, but it works in this case because the variable names are all exactly the same length. Anyway, it's great. As long as you're not afraid of Terminal.
