Rescuing EXIF GPS from iPhone 17 HEIC, in a browser-only app

TL;DR AI
2 min readKey summary
An iPhone 17 HEIC header change broke EXIF GPS extraction in a browser-based photo mapping app.
The lightweight exifr parser rejected the new files after Apple added compatible brands to the HEIC header.
The developer now tries exifr first and dynamically loads ExifReader only when HEIC parsing fails.
This restores map placement for affected photos without forcing every user to download a much larger parser.

