iPhone 16 Pro is said to support JPEG XL format

According to both 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 support from JPEG XL is not listed on 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 has Apple’s estimates for file sizes with each format:

• 11 MB for JPEG-XL Lossy ProRAW at 12 MP
• 18 MB for JPEG-XL Lossless ProRAW at 12 MP
• 20 MB for JPEG-XL Lossy ProRAW at 48 MP
• 46 MB for JPEG-XL Lossless ProRAW at 48 MP

By comparison, Apple’s ProRAW format (which uses the Adobe Digital Negative format .dng) is around 75MB for a 48 MP image. So lossless JPEG-XL is around 40 percent smaller.

What is JPEG XL?

JPEG-XL does not stand for “extra large” as you might think. The Joint Photo Experts Group has moved to using X on all their new formats (JPEG XR, JPEG XT, JPEG XS) and the L stands for Legacy. JPEG-XL is intended to be the main 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 formally adopted by the JPEG group in 2020. It takes the JPEG format into the modern era with support for huge image resolutions, HDR, lossy or lossless encoding, up to 4099 channels (multiple color channels, alpha/transparency, thermal, whatever), animation, a mode for synthetic imagery like charts and graphs, and more.

It should produce both smaller sizes and much higher quality than current JPEG, and will likely beat formats like HEIC at both compression and quality.

Apple added support for viewing JPEG-XL images last year in iOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and watchOS 10. It is not yet widely supported in image editing tools like Photoshop, but many companies have expressed public support for it.