An HEIC is a type of image file that contains compressed data, along with metadata such as the location a photograph was taken, the date it was created, and more. While it does reduce picture information, it typically results in a better representation of the original source than an image saved in JPEG format.
Re-saving an image over and over and over again in a lossy format (a format like JPEG that tosses some data each time you save/compress the file) slowly but surely degrades the image. This is called generation loss, and it's demonstrated beautifully in these almost painful-to-watch YouTube videos.
Heads up: digital rights management (DRM) could be coming to the JPEG image format. That's right... the same kind of controversial technology that's currently being used to protect movie, music, and book copyrights could one day be used to restrict the usage of images, and that proposal has people up in arms.
Every so often, a new image format comes to town and attempts to overthrow the established order of how images (and photos) are saved and shared. In 2010, Google announced a new format called WebP, which promised to speed up the Web by shrinking file sizes without hurting quality. Last year, well-known programmer Fabrice Bellard unveiled a format of his own called BPG that claimed to pack the same quality of JPEGs at just half the size.
Now there's a new contender that raises the bar (and shrinks file size) even more. It's called FLIF, which stands for Free Lossless Image Format.
Google unveiled a new image format today called WebP that it hopes will make the web faster by cutting files sizes of images without affecting quality. According to a blog post they published earlier today, photos and images account for 65% of the bytes transmitted by websites. In their tests done using 1 million randomly selected images from the web, re-encoding images as WebP resulted in an average file size reduction of 39%. Here's a gallery with image and file size comparisons.