Rutba Office 2.21: HEIC, camera RAW, TIFF and Photoshop files, and Remove location

A phone’s photos are HEIC, a camera’s are RAW, a scanner’s are TIFF, and a designer sends a Photoshop file. Rutba Office 2.21, released on 27 October, opens all of them in Pictures, and most of them in Image too.

Play the film

What’s new in Rutba Office 2.21: many more kinds of picture.

More pictures

• TIFF, a page at a time. A TIFF opens in Pictures, Image, Documents, Worksheets and Presentations, compressed or not. A fax or a scan of several pages shows its pages in a strip, and Image opens the page you choose.
• Photoshop documents (.psd and .psb) open in Pictures and Image as the one picture Photoshop shows. Their layers come in a later version.
• EMF and WMF drawings open in Pictures drawn as lines, shapes and words, not as a flat picture.
• Smaller formats. QOI, Netpbm, Targa, PCX, Radiance HDR and cursors open in Pictures and Image.
• Image saves more: BMP, ICO and TIFF beside PNG, JPEG and WebP, and it opens an SVG at the size you choose.

HEIC and camera RAW, through Windows

HEIC, HEIF, JPEG XR and camera RAW files (DNG, CR2, NEF, ARW, ORF, RW2 and RAF) show in Pictures at the size of your screen, read by the codecs Windows already has rather than by code of our own. HEIC needs Microsoft’s HEIF Image Extensions and HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store, and RAW needs the Raw Image Extension. A RAW photo with no codec shows the full-size JPEG its camera put inside it, and where there is nothing to show, Pictures says which extension it needs. They open in Pictures only for now, not yet in Image.

How to open HEIC photos and camera RAW files on Windows covers every way of doing it, including setting an iPhone to save JPEG in the first place.

Charts and clip art in documents

An Excel chart pasted into a Word document is often kept as an EMF drawing, and old clip art as a WMF. Until 2.21 Presentations drew an EMF only as its frame, and Documents and Worksheets drew none. Now all three draw them where Office draws them, with their lines, shapes, words and pictures in place, and a TIFF or Targa picture inside a document is drawn too. What is an EMF or WMF file explains where they come from.

Remove location, keep the camera

Most phones write where a photo was taken into the file, and it goes wherever the file goes. Image’s export and Pictures’ Batch edit now have Remove location beside Strip all: it takes out the place and keeps the camera’s details, such as the date and the exposure, for anyone who wants them. How to remove the location from a photo shows how to do it on a phone too.

• Details kept on export. JPEG, PNG, WebP and TIFF exports keep the original’s details, from a picture with layers too.
• Details from more pictures. The camera’s details are read from PNG, WebP, HEIC and AVIF as well as JPEG and TIFF.
• Windows’ own stars and tags. The rating and keywords that Windows Photos, Explorer and Lightroom write into a picture show in Details beside Pictures’ own.

Fixes

• Slide shows stay full screen from slide to slide, and the taskbar no longer flickers as each one comes.
• Writing a message is laid out the same in the reading pane, in full view and in a window of its own, with To, Cc and Bcc as wide as Subject.
• A smaller installer, down from 176 MB to 149 MB.
• A damaged picture is refused with a sentence, never a hang.