Yeah , they can be converted but they are loosing sensitive information like location, date etc...

An 'ideal' converter should be about to keep them in EXIF, if that is the intention.

Removing Wikimedia-Site-requests as this task is not about changing a configuration entry from something existing to something else existing. Please see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requesting_wiki_configuration_changes

So can't those files be converted automatically to .jpg or .webp?

It looks like the ImageMagick software supports conversion since version 7.0.7-22 if compiled with --with-libheif according to https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/issues/507 . Also see https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/91640/how-can-i-convert-an-apple-ios-heif-image-into-jpeg

According to https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ImageMagick , Debian (the distribution used on Wikimedia servers) only ships ImageMagick version 6.9.x which means this likely will not happen soon.

Ok, thank you

@Aklapper okay, sorry, I didn't know how to tag this as a feature request. Can the mobile app convert it? (I guess that would only help for Android, which is maybe more likely to use .webp anyway..) Can it be converted with JavaScript? Could a project an Wikimedia Toolforge handle it?

UIAM the WMF would want to keep the original file(s) as well, so that when the HEIF patents expire it could be made available, but there is currently no support for that type of file stashing in the software (see T120454).

In T211745#4818682, @Dinoguy1000 wrote:

UIAM the WMF would want to keep the original file(s) as well, so that when the HEIF patents expire it could be made available, but there is currently no support for that type of file stashing in the software (see T120454).

It will be good, if we can actually upload these files to commons, later they'll automatically show up after copyright's expiration.

FYI Safari just added to their development version an automatic heic to png or jpg conversion, if a website doesn't support heic/heif for upload.
https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/263949/webkit/

In T211745#4816598, @Aklapper wrote:

It looks like the ImageMagick software supports conversion since version 7.0.7-22 if compiled with --with-libheif according to https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/issues/507 . Also see https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/91640/how-can-i-convert-an-apple-ios-heif-image-into-jpeg

According to https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ImageMagick , Debian (the distribution used on Wikimedia servers) only ships ImageMagick version 6.9.x which means this likely will not happen soon.

Debian 10 (Buster) and Debian 11 (bullseye) both have version 6.9.x of ImageMagick, but both distributions support heic/heif with the distributions supplied ImageMagic. There is no need for version 7 for this to work.