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HEIC Images causing issues

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2
Thursday
DuncanC
by
Occasional Contributor
Thursday

I'm working through helping recover some surveys from a field user's phone and trying to figure out what went wrong. 

This survey has been working for months, and continues to work, but this one users device will not submit their surveys.  I've gotten the logs and sqlite file from them now and it looks like the issue is the photos are saved as HEIC.

The status text for all the surveys is:

{"code":400,"details":["Attachment file type (Photo_24_06_28_07_21_02.HEIC, application/octet-stream) is not allowed."],"message":""}

I've done some looking into it and it seems like this was resolved years ago by having iOS devices convert to jpg when the image is attached.  Other users are on iPhones and their photos upload properly. 

Does anyone have any ideas why things went wrong for this one user?

I know the fix for them is likely to switch to most compatible mode in their phone's photos section. But I'd still like to understand why this happened so we can avoid it in the future.

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2 Replies
DougBrowning
by MVP Esteemed Contributor
MVP Esteemed Contributor
Thursday

Yes there are a number of issues with HEIC the last few years.  Been posted more and more the last few weeks.  I think a iOS update may have done it.

Like you said the answer is to change to most compatible mode.  Do not have all the details since really only iOS knows that kind of internals.  But for sure change it.  Lots of issues like stripping GPS has got us.

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ChristopherCounsell
by MVP Regular Contributor
MVP Regular Contributor
yesterday

There was a defect for this that is fixed in the 3.20.69 release. 

HEIC files are default for iOS since 11.x. HEIC files are not supported in ArcGIS Online. Survey123 has been correcting this for years by formatting pictures as jpegs when they are attached. A recent survey release broke this (3.20.65 I think) and they hotfixed it in .69.

HEIC format can strip .exif, that's something of a separate issue that might make it worthwhile having the users change to most compatible. I prefer watermarking in Survey123 as its visible.

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