The iPhone 16 family has arrived and includes many new features, some of which Apple has played very close to its vest. One such improvement is the in

Why Apple Uses JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 and What it Means for Your Photos

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2024-09-20 02:30:04

The iPhone 16 family has arrived and includes many new features, some of which Apple has played very close to its vest. One such improvement is the inclusion of JPEG XL file types, which promise improved image quality compared to standard JPEG files while delivering relatively smaller file sizes.

JPEG XL is a next-generation image encoding standard formally standardized in early 2022. Since then, JPEG XL (.jxl) has been adopted by numerous operating systems and applications, albeit with some notable holdouts.

Apple and its various software iterations have supported JPEG XL for at least a year, including in Finder, Preview, Final Cut Pro, Pages, Photos, Mail, Safari, and more. Adobe has also supported the format for a while, including in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic.

Despite JPEG XL supporting reversible JPEG transcoding and being superior to JPEG in terms of quality and efficiency, the format has yet to be widely adopted. Neither Chrome nor Firefox, two very popular web browsers, support the format natively, for example. Extensions are available to support JPEG XL files, but they’re not installed by default.