According to 9to5Mac and MacRumors, the iPhone 16 Pro models (and only the Pro models, it seems) will support capturing images in the new JPEG XL format. While JPEG XL support isn’t mentioned in Apple’s specifications, both sites claim to have seen code confirming it.
Users will be able to select JPEG XL Lossless or JPEG XL Lossy compression, and 9to5Mac even offers Apple’s estimates for file sizes with each format:
- 11MB for JPEG-XL Lossy ProRAW at 12MP
- 18MB for JPEG-XL Lossless ProRAW at 12MP
- 20MB for JPEG-XL Lossy ProRAW at 48MP
- 46MB for JPEG-XL Lossless ProRAW at 48MP
By comparison, Apple’s ProRAW format (which uses the Adobe Digital Negative .dng format) is about 75MB for a 48MP image, so the lossless JPEG-XL format is about 40% smaller.
What is JPEG XL?
JPEG-XL does not stand for “extra large” as one might think. The Joint Photo Experts Group has decided to use X on all of its new formats (JPEG XR, JPEG XT, JPEG XS) and the L stands for Legacy. JPEG-XL is meant to be the primary JPEG image standard for the next 20 years or more, just as JPEG has been so popular for the last 30 years.
JPEG-XL is a fast, low-complexity (easy and fast to encode and decode by modern standards), royalty-free, and open-source format that was officially adopted by the JPEG group in 2020. It brings JPEG into the modern era with support for huge image resolutions, HDR, lossy and lossless encoding, up to 4099 channels (multiple color channels, alpha/transparency, thermal, etc.), animation, a mode for synthetic imagery like tables and charts, and much more.
It should produce both smaller sizes and much higher quality than current JPEG, and will likely beat formats like HEIC in both compression and quality.
Apple added support for displaying JPEG-XL images in iOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and watchOS 10 last year. The feature isn’t yet widely supported in image-editing tools like Photoshop, but many companies have publicly expressed support for it.
