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Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

(www.theverge.com)
669 points danso | 26 comments | 20 May 20 19:36 UTC | HN request time: 1.661s | source | bottom
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azinman2 ◴[21 May 20 19:49 UTC] No.23264065[source]▶
It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either specifying the accepted types directly in the web page’s input tag (as many have pointed out, and thus would have just worked correctly in the background), or by accepting and converting HEIC files themselves. At minimum, they should have put their suggested settings changes into the webpage itself before you started, and/or given a practice website to make sure it worked correctly.

College board owns this process, and it’s their job to make sure the setup works correctly for all students, including those who might not all be technically inclined.

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1. lone_haxx0r ◴[21 May 20 20:04 UTC] No.23264295[source]▶
Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default.

[1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923

[2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

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2. azinman2 ◴[21 May 20 20:11 UTC] No.23264389[source]▶
First of all, as many others have pointed out by specifying the accepted file formats in the <input> tag, they would avoid HEIC entirely as the phone would simply convert to one of the accepted formats.

It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. Even if that were the case, I'm certain there is some commercial license software they could purchase to do that for them. This isn't an open-source endeavor, and they charge each student to take the exam.

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3. tantalor ◴[21 May 20 20:24 UTC] No.23264598[source]▶
Here's a LGPL decoder: https://github.com/strukturag/libheif
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4. Gaelan ◴[21 May 20 20:31 UTC] No.23264736[source]▶
Assuming GP is right about the patents, the College Board would open themselves up to patent suits by using that without a license.
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5. lone_haxx0r ◴[21 May 20 20:32 UTC] No.23264749[source]▶
1. I think both parties are at fault

The testing system for not using the <input> tag appropiately and Apple for using a closed, patent encumbered format as the default when most of their users don't know about software patents.

> It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend.

It's reasonable to assume that it is.

2. Sure, the college could pay, but looking at the broader problem here, saying that colleges should accept closed formats would make it really hard for open source online testing systems to proliferate, and all colleges around the world would have to pay royalties to the HEIC patent holders.

Even if they were to implement an open source decoder, unless you have plenty of lawyers, the legal uncertainty of the situation could be unacceptable to many individuals/institutions.

3. If the format was open in the first place, maybe we would have lots of open source decoders and maybe the library that the testing system developer used would have support for it, and would have transparently worked without the developer knowing about the format.

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6. azinman2 ◴[21 May 20 20:42 UTC] No.23264918{3}[source]▶
1. I'm not going to argue about Apple's defaults here. It simply isn't germane when the college board has full control over the inputs and iPhones will make up a significant portion of test takers.

2. I think you don't understand what the College Board is. It's a single organization that administers test. This isn't something each university needs to deal with. They make and administer the test to all college-bound students in the US each year.

3. There are plenty of existing open source decoders, and all major open source graphics programs already accept the format (GraphicConverter, ImageMagick, GIMP), in addition to all the major OSes (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android).

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7. trhway ◴[21 May 20 20:45 UTC] No.23264977[source]▶
>Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3]

College board could have added "iPhone HEIC license surcharge" for those users - that would have gotten Apple attention :)

8. lone_haxx0r ◴[21 May 20 20:56 UTC] No.23265186{4}[source]▶
2. In the specific case of the College Board, yes. Keep in mind that maybe the license fee is based on number of institutions and every student would end up indirectly paying for the license.

But also think about independent educational institutions (primary, secondary, higher, etc), think about all schools and colleges in other countries (we're all in a similar situation). All of them would have to find a way to license HEIC, just because Apple decided that they wanted HEIC as their default format.

3. I'd guess that companies that implement HEIC pay for their license.

The legal situation of using open source programs to decode licensed and patent encumbered formats is uncertain to me, and I guess it is to most people, including software engineers and managers.

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9. pornel ◴[21 May 20 21:02 UTC] No.23265284[source]▶
Patents are separate from copyright, so even an independently developed freely licensed open-source software is illegal to use without a patent license from patent owners.

https://www.hevcadvance.com/pdfnew/LicensorList.pdf

10. tinus_hn ◴[21 May 20 21:34 UTC] No.23265690[source]▶
So what formats do they accept when they want a video? Theora?
11. tedunangst ◴[21 May 20 21:40 UTC] No.23265759[source]▶
Wait. There's a way to get safari to upload HEIF without conversion? All my photos, which are HEIF on my phone, turn into jpeg when I upload them. I've been trying to get the original HEIF off for months.
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12. voisin ◴[21 May 20 21:56 UTC] No.23265920{3}[source]▶
Dropbox and OneDrive allow you to sync HEIF instead of JPEG.
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13. bdcravens ◴[21 May 20 22:05 UTC] No.23266036[source]▶
If you don't use your phone to upload, but transfer the file to your computer, it won't do the conversion.
14. savrajsingh ◴[21 May 20 22:34 UTC] No.23266315[source]▶
Yes, I was wondering why a recently completed photo upload feature for a web app didn't have this problem -- it's because we specified image/jpeg on the file input, so iPhone auto-converts. Likely a failure within the college board's software engineering processes for not testing this use case and then finding and deploying this fix? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...
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15. oivey ◴[21 May 20 22:41 UTC] No.23266391{5}[source]▶
No other entity other than The College Board receives the raw test. Everyone else only receives the results. The College Board also charges around $100 for each of these tests, so even if they had to support the format (they don’t) they really should easily be able to do so.
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16. thetinguy ◴[21 May 20 22:45 UTC] No.23266429{3}[source]▶
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207022
17. xenonite ◴[21 May 20 23:23 UTC] No.23266812{5}[source]▶
The whole issue is easily circumvented by correctly setting the accepted inputs, which is clearly the responsibility of the webpage owners. Next time, someone uploads JPEG2000 and runs into the same problem. I guess then it’s again someone else who gets the blame?
18. loeg ◴[22 May 20 00:37 UTC] No.23267429{6}[source]▶
Note that many students take many of these tests, even dozens, so $100/test is quite a lot for what is usually a few hours sit down in a big room with a handful of proctors for hundreds of students (i.e., no more expensive to run than a typical university intro-level class final with a professor and some student TAs).
19. loeg ◴[22 May 20 00:38 UTC] No.23267434{3}[source]▶
Google Photos syncs HEIF/HEIC to their cloud.
20. gary-kim ◴[22 May 20 00:52 UTC] No.23267554{3}[source]▶
Some of the issues seems to be because some of these students transferred the HEIC file to their computers then tried to upload them by changing the extension of the file.
21. mlyle ◴[22 May 20 02:05 UTC] No.23268008{5}[source]▶
The license fee is based on the number of devices performing the conversion; each institution gets a number free; it's less than a few dollars per device.
22. mlyle ◴[22 May 20 02:06 UTC] No.23268014{3}[source]▶
Maybe they should just pay the $5 fee...
23. cowsandmilk ◴[22 May 20 02:21 UTC] No.23268096{3}[source]▶
If the iPhone took pictures in webp format, exactly the same thing would have occurred. College board doesn’t accept that either despite it being open.
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24. tedunangst ◴[22 May 20 02:27 UTC] No.23268123{3}[source]▶
Do I really need to explain that if I upload a file to Dropbox or iCloud it's still not on the web site form where I want it?
25. pilif ◴[22 May 20 02:30 UTC] No.23268145{4}[source]▶
webp is also possibly patent-encumbered. At least if you ask various members of the MPEG-LA.

The only safe format for photo-like content remains JPEG probably for decades to come

26. m0dest ◴[22 May 20 09:15 UTC] No.23270099{4}[source]▶
Only native apps that explicitly opt-in to HEIC support.