HEIC recovery on Mac: iPhone photos from exFAT cards, drives, and SD

Every iPhone since iOS 11 shoots HEIC by default, and HEIC files end up in a lot of places besides the phone: copied to an external drive, offloaded to an SD card through a camera adapter, exported from Photos to an exFAT drive for a Windows machine, or sitting in a folder that got deleted. Recovering them is different from recovering JPEGs in a way that matters, because HEIC isn't a JPEG-style stream with a start and end marker. It's a container, and it's carved the way video is.

HEIC is HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) with HEVC-compressed image data inside. The file is an ISO Base Media File, the same family as MP4, MOV and Canon CR3. It opens with a `ftyp` box whose major brand is `heic` (or `heix`, `mif1`, `msf1`, depending on the encoder), followed by a `meta` box that describes the items in the file (the primary image, a thumbnail, sometimes a depth map or an exposure bracket) and an `mdat` box holding the HEVC data. Because the format is a set of length-prefixed boxes, a file's true size can be computed by walking them; there's no end marker to look for.

That's also why a JPEG-style carver produces nothing useful on a folder of HEICs: the bytes `FF D8 FF` never appear at the start of one. And a carver that matches `ftyp` without checking the brand labels every HEIC as `.mp4`, which QuickTime then fails to play and Preview won't open. DataRecover Pro's deep scan checks the brand, so HEIF/HEIC files are labeled `.heic` and MP4/MOV files stay video.

A Live Photo is a still HEIC plus a short MOV (about three seconds of HEVC video with audio) that share a content identifier in their metadata. On the phone they're presented as one item. On a drive or card they're two files, `IMG_1234.HEIC` and `IMG_1234.MOV`. If you recover only the HEIC, you have the still and no motion. If the directory survives and the quick scan returns files by name, you'll see both and recover both. If you're carving, both are found (HEIC by its brand, MOV by `ftyp`) but the names are gone, and re-pairing them means matching on capture time or on the content identifier in the metadata. Photos on the Mac will re-pair them on import when the identifier matches.

On an exFAT or FAT32 card or drive: deleted files inside an intact folder are still in the directory with a deleted flag, and the quick scan returns them with names. If the whole folder was deleted, the entries may or may not survive; if the drive was formatted, they're gone and you're carving.

On an APFS drive (a Mac's internal disk or a Mac-formatted external): deleted files may still exist in a local Time Machine snapshot or in an older APFS checkpoint, both of which DataRecover Pro walks during a scan. On an internal SSD, TRIM can erase freed blocks within minutes, so act quickly; see APFS SSD recovery and TRIM.

On an NTFS drive that came from a Windows machine: the quick scan reads NTFS's master file table, and deleted entries there often survive a long time.

Deep scan carves HEIC by signature across all of these and sizes each file from its boxes. Filenames are lost in that path; capture time, location and camera model are inside each file's EXIF and survive.

1. Stop writing to the drive or card. If it's the Mac's internal disk, avoid installing anything and don't let Photos re-import.

2. Open DataRecover Pro, select the drive, and run a quick scan. Recover any HEIC and MOV pairs it returns to a different drive.

3. If the quick scan doesn't find them, run a deep scan and filter to images. Thumbnails render from the HEIC itself, so you can see each photo before recovering; Quick Look works too. Both are free, no account.

4. Recover to a different drive, then import into Photos to re-pair Live Photos.

Download DataRecover Pro. If it can't recover your files, you don't pay.

A HEIC that was partly overwritten will have a valid `ftyp` and `meta` and damaged `mdat`, and Preview will show a blank or refuse it. There's no simple structural repair for HEVC image data the way there is for a JPEG scan, but a HEIC usually contains a thumbnail item and sometimes a full-size JPEG (photos edited on the phone, or exported with compatibility on). DataRecover Pro's repair pass extracts the intact embedded image as a salvage and labels it as such. The repair page explains how that's presented.

If the photos were only ever in iCloud Photos and were deleted there, they're in Recently Deleted for 30 days and then gone from Apple's servers; no disk scan on your Mac finds them unless a copy was downloaded. If the loss was on an internal SSD and TRIM has run, the blocks are erased. If the drive has been formatted and reused, whatever was overwritten is gone. And if you need the photos off an iPhone or iPhone backup rather than a drive, that's a different workflow; DataRecover Pro handles iPhone backups separately from disk recovery.