IPhones' default photo format is HEIC, something that Windows doesn't open by default.

Leaving aside that this one is Microsoft’s fault, how is it painful? Do you even have an iPhone? And if so, how often do you move images to your PC from it, without those images going through an intermediary service?

This is not an Apple thing. Android phones use HEIC by default as well. This is a good thing. HEIC uses smaller file sizes and has fewer artifacts than JPEG.

None of my 3 Android phones used HEIC by default.

Yea ... no, sorry to say but this one's on Microsoft. I get it, hurr durr Apple expensive and elitist, but they know where to put up their walled garden and where not to. For example they used to have their own video container .mov but they're way past forcing something like that onto iPhone users. And even back then, the actual codec they committed themselves to in those days was H.264, a standard that's open to adoption by anybody. You can easily turn an old .mov into an .mp4 or .mkv without needing to alter the actual content of the file and that content is playable by pretty much every media device built in the last 15+ years.

HEIC isn't Apple's thing it's from the MPEGroup, also easily licensable by anybody. I guess the reason why it wasn't part of Windows 10 from the beginning is because they both came out in mid 2015. Windows 10 seems to have adopted it for viewing (and later editing) in 2018 but they make you hit a stupid download button in their store to get it so that's lame.

Yep. Lack of format support is usually to blame on the one who doesn't support the format. You can absolutely blame Apple for this too though, their apps can't open e.g. Matroska video or FLAC.

And perplexingly, they don't support uploading HEIC, their own image format of choice, on the web iCloud Photos. So there's that too.

(At this point my music library is stored as ALAC because it's well supported in both Linux and Apple's OSes. Really wish it wouldn't have to be that way though. Someone needs to tell them about ffmpeg.)

For example they used to have their own video container .mov

It's always very very funny every time someone mentions MOV, because while it's very similar to MP4, it's actually an open format while MP4 isn't (!). You actually have to pay for the MP4 standard document while Apple just gives you the MOV documentation.

Also at least taking a screen capture on macOS still gives you a MOV container, actually.
- Apple made ALAC as an alternative to FLAC due to the dubious licensing around FLAC at the time.
  
  Interesting. I can’t find anything about the FLAC licensing issues. Do you have a link?
  
  (Also, correction — Wikipedia says macOS in general can play FLAC. I guess it’s just the Music app that can’t import them.)
  
  I’m really not sure where I originally read it. I did some digging and I found some discussion about FLAC and patent trolls on a few forums, including the Talk page of the Wikipedia article, but I haven’t found anything concrete.
  
  It might be that the patent troll thing was just a rumor!
  
  well there ain’t no more licensing issues now are there
  
  Yes they are no longer scared of the licensing enough most modern Apple devices do have at least some FLAC support.
  
  Also ALAC is a free and open source codec which also has wide support.
  
  And with a tool like FFMPEG you can easily convert between the two and they are both lossless so there is no data lost in the conversion.
  
  So really just use whichever you like it really doesn’t matter.
  
  since you seem to be knowledgeable about this, i wanna ask: do you think one should use .opus or .ogg as the file extension for OPUS files?
  
  I think both work since opus is the codec but ogg is the container, but personally I’d probably go with .opus because it’s more descriptive.
  
  Btw Apple’s ALAC and AAC files are typically stored in an mp4 container but with the m4a extension to mark it as intended to be audio only (although it may have a video track, which usually is used for album art).

HEIC is a much better-compressed format than JPEG that all Androids support; iirc JPEG XL (kinda dead) and Google's WebP are the only other big-name formats with better photographic compression. Windows was the only major operating system that chose to have consumers separately pay the patent fee, none of which goes to Apple. Since Windows 11 22H2, HEIC images work out-of-the-box.

Webp breaks my balls, save a pic from online and it saves with the chrome logo and then doesnt work.
- It's kinda paradoxical. It's undersupported simply because people don't like it because it's undersupported. At least all browsers can open it well.
- Back when I was on windows I would rename .webp to .jpg (or was it .png, it’s been a long time) and it would open. Now I’m on Linux and it just works.
Better-compressed in saved Mbytes, but comparing images, that compression somehow looks more...fake. Hard to describe how.

For W10, you install an app to get the codec, then you’re done. It’s built in on W11. Same as HEVC video which is used very commonly in piracy. Are pirates out to make it “purposefully painful” or are they just using modern codecs? Android also can save to HEIC or AVIF.

Here's the free oem app as an msix package as Microsoft removed the store link. link

(yes I did accidentally upload it to the wrong collection, but I don't think I can change that)
Yeah it's a bit of a tossup between them. Apple definitely chose it to be a dick. However, Microsoft could rectify it easily if they wanted to.

Both HEVC and HEIC thought cost money, and the vast majority of windows users will never use the codecs. Including the license with every copy of Windows is added cost to the end user that they receive no benefit from, so I understand why they would leave it out. HEVC prompts you if you try to play to go to the store and buy the license, which is good for your entire account. Honestly it's not a terrible thing to do. I was one of the 1% of people who would play HEVC natively on Windows, so yeah the $3 license made sense
- Apple definitely chose it to be a dick.
  
  What other image format supports HDR and modern compression algorithms? AVIF also requires a special codec. This is just codec stuff, I really don't see it as anyone being a dick. Android can also use these modern formats, with the same requirements if you want to open them on Windows.
  
  Kinda surprising to me that people so frequently recommend using Linux here, yet taking 30 seconds to install a free codec on Windows is apparently a big deal.
  
  OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It's not like OpenEXR's choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings, kind of the opposite of what you want for the web where saving space is often paramount and fidelity a bonus.
  
  Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there's also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There's practically nothing pixel-related you can't do with it though it might require custom tooling.
  
  I literally said it was easy to do.
  
  Let’s try this again: in a world where Apple is not a dick, what modern image format do they use that isn’t subject to these same codec requirements?
  
  If they were doing this just to be dicks, they’d spin off one of their own formats like they did with ALAC. They didn’t, they used HEIC which was also used by Android (which is now using AVIF).
  
  Get yer logic out of here
  
  Answer the question
  
  What other image format supports HDR and modern compression algorithms that don't require a license?
  
  There, ftfy. You answer the question.
  
  are you implying that there is indeed no better choice?
  
  webp, but that’s google. jpeg xt, but i see virtually no one adopting that.
  
  I dunno, JPEG XT maybe? At a loss here.
  
  Why did Android also use HEIC, did they choose this just to be a dick like Apple?
  
  Seeing how Android adopted it 4 years later, it's pretty obvious that Apple made it the de-facto standard. I agree with you, something like JPEG XT or really any other open format would have been a great choice, but they made HEIC the standard, which requires a license. Dick move.

I just plug a cable from my iPhone to my Linux mint laptop and view/transfer what photos I want through my file browser… seems real easy.

You could use KDE Connect and do it wirelessly as well. Who needs cables for anything but charging these days?
- I use the cable to charge my phone. Am I the only person still doing this?
  
  I was mostly joking, but KDE Connect has made phone-to-PC transfers much more convenient for me. I've only tried it between Android and Linux, but once connected, it basically nounts my phone as a drive that I can browse or copy/paste to and from.
  
  Generally, I only use a cable to charge, and I rarely need/want to transfer files at the same time as I want to charge.
  
  That looks pretty good - might investigate if I can use it without WiFi, i.e. just using mobile data.
  
  I’m a bit weird as I’ve never had any IT training but have been using all types of computers for about 40-ish years. Back in the day I had a psion 5mx running epoc OS. To transfer a Word (Not to be confused with MS’s Word) file I had to convert it to .txt or .rtf and then save it to a compact flash 8mb memory card. Remove that card from the psion, plug in the CF card reader to my iBook (dual boot OS 9.1.2 and Mac OS X) and import the text. For some reason these files were always read only so then you open a new Jotter file and copy and paste the text over. Absolute ballache. Easy file transfer is a holy grail of digital living.
  
  I learned of KDE Connect on here a couple months ago. I don't use it a ton, but it's really convenient for a few things. File transfers are easy, and you can send your clipboard between devices. That's been useful for when I'm communicating with someone on my phone, I can look stuff up on my PC and share URLs easily.
  
  Thanks for all that info and the recommendation. I’ll give it a go.

Someone tried to send me a picture they took and it looked like hot garbage until they sent it over email. Not because it couldn't be sent without feeding it through a potato first, because Apple wants a worse experience for anyone not in their ecosystem.

When they are the oddball in the group though, it just makes iPhone's look like a worse option.

Same thing with the M4A music format. My Mac struggles to read MP3s in most programs (other than Preview). I have to convert them to M4A if I want to import them anywhere.

Preview does not play MP3 or AAC.

And what’s a program that’s not accepting of MP3 files that generally works with audio?

You seem to be a bit confused.
- I don't think you understood my comment. My Mac just hates mp3s. Programs like Audacity and Audio Timeliner always struggle with them unless I convert them to m4a first. Never was an issue on Windows. Preview will play them but that's about the only program that doesn't hate them.
  
  Preview is an app on macOS for viewing and editing images and PDFs.
  
  According to the Audacity manual it supports MP3. But you need to install additional software for AAC (M4A).
  
  https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/importing_audio.html
  
  So it’s strange that you are struggling with this. It seems something more is going on here…
  
  Also, just in case it was confusing: M4A is just a file extension used to indicate AAC audio in an MP4 container.
  
  That’s a bummer that AudioTimeliner is struggling with MP3 files. Small independent apps like this usually depend on outside libraries to play back audio. And looking at the version history, it looks like the author has had to make multiple updates to fix playback support over the years.
  
  I see that AudioTimeliner is niche software that has been around for about 22 years, and it’s cross platform. It seems normal to me that it would be picky. Audacity on the other hand, something weird is going on.
  
  I work in higher education, so I understand how relying on niche software like AudioTimeliner goes. I’m sympathetic.
  
  But there is a lack of precision in what you are describing, and your symptoms are directly counter to the Audacity documentation.

However, they still forget that working with their products is the worst pain in the arse.