> these .jxl files are wrapped in a DNG container, so you can’t just fire off .jxl files from the iPhone 16 Pro.
Any move toward JPEG XL support is good, but this is lame. Even if the Chrome team comes to its senses and restores jxl support you won't be able to view these files.
Of course it’s .dng; .jxl doesn’t carry the metadata needed to process a RAW image because it’s not intended for that.
That’s good news. I’ve watched a really good video in the last weeks about JPEG XL advantages, if you want to learn a bit more: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FlWjf8asI4Y
To increase adoption they should not have limited this to the latest iPhone models. Why on earth can a one year old iPhone 15’s CPU not handle encoding JXL? It can encode 4K video in real time, so this should be no problem at all, right?
I’d guess hardware acceleration could have something to do with it
I don't know, but my guesswork is that the DNG/ProRAW/JXL support comes with compatibility challenges. Limiting the size of the launch to well-informed photography prosumers and professionals will help to iron out the compatibility challenges — rather than make all confused consumers face these challenges at once.
I don't think that hardware support plays a role here. The fastest encoding modes of JPEG XL are ridiculously fast on software, and Apple's CPUs seem powerful enough.
In lossy mode I think there is no difference between AVIF, HEIC or JXL. AVIF is even a little bit ahead.
For lossless mode, JXL's fast modes (-e1 and -e2) are fast. But their compression ratio is terrible. The higher levels are not usable in a camera in terms of speed.
Of course, my favorite and many people's favorite in this regard is HALIC (High Availability Lossless Image Compression). It is a speed/compression monster. The problem is that for now it is closed source and there is no Google or similar company behind it.
The CPU isn’t used for encoding video
Encoding a single image with the CPU takes nothing compared to modern video codecs.
This, I just don't understand why it seems only latest iPhones got this.
I also don't know, but I suspect the fact that Apple not only develops the OS, but also sells the devices, might have something to do with it...
Crystal clear case of faked obsolescence, a major cause for environmental damage.
Costing the planet our future sustainability in the name of greed.
And all you have to say about it is a snark?
Reading the whole piece a few days ago, it's a pretty good overview of the promises of JPEG XL.
Apart from that, Apple's POV and PR bits being given such a central role felt a bit weird, especially as petapixel already spotted Samsung adopting JPEG XL months before Apple.
Aside from the petty "who was first" bickering, it's a completely different move to adopt a common standard already accepted by rival companies on the android side, and it means we can really expect a larger adoption of JPEG XL than the other standards Apple just pitched on its own.
That was the biggest beacon of hope IMHO, it would have benefited from more prominence.
Attaching any significance to being “first” on open standards is a game Apple rarely plays, but which others impose upon them because Apple’s adoption is (rightly or wrongly) seen as the most consequential and/or most newsworthy inflection point.
In the specific case of JPEG XL I think Google support will be the real inflection point: no chrome and default android support is a deal breaker for wide audience content publishers.
The ironic part being of course that Chrome used to support it way too early, but support was dropped as nobody followed. So yes, Apple support is a big deal, but not more consequential than the other actors of the pretty vast ecosystems.
I don’t have iphone 16, and this article puzzles me.
Is apple only using jxl for their “raw” camera capture, but not regular camera capture?? The non-raw use case seems to be the one that would have more impact to regular folks.
Why? Is jxl inferior to HEIC?
ProRAW files are large, so there's more potential to save space, making ProRAW a more attractive feature to use for a wider audience. From the average consumer's perspective, JPEG XL offers less of a benefit as a replacement for HEIC, but my guess is that it will eventually replace HEIC when it's more widely adopted. ProRAW is a less compatible file format to begin with and geared toward a certain type of user, so it's an easier place to start, whereas replacing HEIC with JPEG XL might cause confusion and annoyance.
JPEG XL also supports re-encoding existing JPEG files to decrease file size while keeping the original file quality. That really seems like useful feature but so far I haven’t seen any tooling (in macOS) to re-encode my existing photo library.
It would be safe to assume that Apple will eventually add a way to recompress your photo library to JXL… if they weren’t in the business of selling storage and cloud storage. They have in the past released tools to optimize storage so it wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary, but… I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Thank god they went with a standard this time. When they launched HEIC, there wasn’t a single workable open source decoder. Hell, there wasn’t even a single non-Apple decoder.
XL color depth looks amazing.
An annoying oversight is that while my Fujifilm camera is modern enough to shoot HEIF+RAW, Apple Photos only knows to group JPEG+RAW as a single photo. Because Apple did not spend a day of engineering time bringing feature parity for the file format they themselves promoted, it has turned into a bigger feature to match and merge the HEIF and RAW assets after the fact. After several years, I'm growing doubtful they'll ever accomplish it.
I have yet to see whether they did it right with JXL+RAW (or is it DNG+RAW?) but hopefully they will before it becomes available in mainstream cameras.
HEIC is a standard too - it wasn’t a secret internal Apple project…
It might be a standard, but for a long time the licensing costs were exorbitant, and that likely stifled adoption. While licensing costs have come down, the pushback against HEIC’s pricing led to the development of better, royalty-free alternatives—including JPEG XL. Thank god they went with an unencumbered standard this time.
Windows showing you a popup saying you need to buy a £0.79 windows add on to just open photos taken with an iPhone was always unbelievable. Like some kind of malware or something.
In what context was thisnprompt appearing. I can not think of a time I have ever struggled to be able to open a photo from my iPhone in any of the apps I commonly use. Is this a Windows application issue or an OS issue, and how were the photos coming to your machine?
Just to clarify, this is an honest question not sarcasm.
If you directly download the HEIC photos to your windows PC.
The iPhone tends to convert to jpeg whenever you email/whatsapp/etc a photo, so it's only direct file import that nets the original HEIC file.
Exactly, I'd upload a bunch of photos to Google Drive to download to my PC, Google Drive could open them fine, but the default windows photo viewer app would demand payment to open them.
Thank god they went with a standard because when they went with a standard it wasn’t widespread?
Firefox Nightly is listed as supported on the jpegxl.info web site. My understanding is that it does not fully support the specification yet which is why it is not released to production.
Weirdly enough, JPEG-XL support is actually fairly decent in Firefox already and there were patches developed by the community that work well for things such as color profiles, animation support etc. I’ve had them in Waterfox for a few years now - it was a purely “political” decision, if you want to call it that, to stop any more progress until recently.
Man this back and forth is really frustrating.
So Google killed XL a while ago already and I feel like either Microsoft or Mozilla at least considered following suit. After Apple has done heic for a while now I assumed it might go that way regarding a jpeg replacement, but now they did a 180 and switched to xl. I mean good, it's not as patent encumbered, but wtf am I supposed to expect for the future now? Will Google add XL back to chrome? I guess it will take another decade or five until we have a jpeg replacement that's being universally agreed upon, because come on, it would be too easy if we don't get another plot twist where a major player jumps onto something else again for a while.
How does JPEG XL compare to Apple’s current default HEIC? Is HEIC eventually going away in favor of JPEG XL?
I can’t wait for animated JPEG XL to replace animated GIF.
Is part of the reason patents / licensing issues with HEVC that makes it harder to adopt?
They already adopted it 7 years ago so no.
For one you can't use Chrome to view those photos.
note: the format was co-developed by Google who also makes Chome.
Indeed, but Chrome removed support for the format some time ago.
Cries in iPhone11Pro … also WTF!? Why not make QOK format and x266 available and exclusive to iPhone17
please tell me this means chromium will un-drop jxl and we can just stick them on the web like png/jpg/gif
The article states that because the file sizes are smaller the format is more environmentally friendly because, they state, "All that stuff lives somewhere, and wherever it is, it requires energy to operate."
Cold storage exists, as well as different tiers of storage. The hard drive on my shelf isn't using any energy. Are they storing all of their images in RAM? Maybe you could say this would lead to less use of storage space so less use of raw materials for storage devices.
I would posit that it is possible this format is less environmentally friendly because it takes more compute cycles to produce the output from the compressed data, but I have no real insight into this just intuition.
If people are going to take credit for crunching something down from 10 MB to 8 MB, I wish they'd also take the blame for massively bloating something into a modern monstrosity out of sheer laziness or betting that profit margins will be higher if they waste user time, storage, and cpu for the sake of releasing the project faster.
Most iPhone users would be storing photos in iCloud.
And most professionals are storing their photos in Creative Cloud.
And in both cases the photo data would be replicated on multiple hard drives for redundancy. So it would definitely be more environmentally friendly to have smaller photos.
The more important reason is that cloud storage costs significantly more than local.
[deleted]
> Are they storing all of their images in RAM?
Consider the millions of iPhone users uploading new photos and scrolling their iCloud-hosted photo library. A substantial amount of photo data is in RAM at any given moment, spread across many network devices.
> I would posit that it is possible this format is less environmentally friendly because it takes more compute cycles
I'm curious how much energy it takes to send bits over cellular or wifi, my intuition is that this is orders of magnitude higher than compression or encoding.
> The hard drive on my shelf isn't using any energy
That part would not matter regardless. RAM is powered at all times, kept being refreshed too. Unless, of course you mean, they'd have to keep buying new machines to store more pictures.
On the other hand, we have industry defined standards to compress TCP headers [1] - incurring a cost to compress/decompress but resulting in lower packet sizes.
What is environmentally (OK, mentally) unfriendly to me is the creation of new formats that various apps, and notably, websites where I post images, can't handle, so I swear a bit, convert the image to jpeg or png, and post.
People are part of the environment, too!
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. ... Thoreau.
> The hard drive on my shelf isn't using any energy.
When it filled up you put it on a shelf and bought a new one.
That's essentially what I do with my RAW files. One hard drive per year. It's still less expensive than every cloud storage I looked at.
You guys do do read tests occasionally, and transfer the data old drives to newer drives right?
I hope you get two at least. Backups needed.
This whataboutism we are hearing now about "the energy needed to store your pictures" is just corporate whataboutism, trying to push blame onto consumers.
Let's say you have 2 TB of photos stored. If that's consuming more than 2 watts of electricity on average, the cloud providers have to be quite incompetent (they are mostly not).
2 watts is 1 kWh in 20 days, so 18 kWh in one year. The emissions from 18 kWh in the US is around 6 kg of CO2. This is the equivalent of driving a car for about 20 minutes on the highway, one time per year. Or spending 5 minutes longer in the shower 4 times per year.
Yes, yes, but 48mP only, when will they finally have 240MP on a sensor that can be mounted on the ass of an ant. But double the protrusion 6 times I guess for the lens supporting the new tech and whatnot (tele-macro at night in a panoramic sport event!), it may even take picture for you without thinking taking a picture, you purchased a smartphone didn't you, let it be smart then, it will know better than you what you need, how you need it, and when you need it, all is necessary to fix it to your forehead so it can see what you see, tiny bitsy inconvenience beyond storing and managing the billboard sized but polaroid quality stream of pics vomited out by the device - never to see the most.
This good photo = phone deception marketers pushed on idiotic customers who actually pay the premium for the marketing material is pathetic.
> these .jxl files are wrapped in a DNG container, so you can’t just fire off .jxl files from the iPhone 16 Pro.
Any move toward JPEG XL support is good, but this is lame. Even if the Chrome team comes to its senses and restores jxl support you won't be able to view these files.
Of course it’s .dng; .jxl doesn’t carry the metadata needed to process a RAW image because it’s not intended for that.
That’s good news. I’ve watched a really good video in the last weeks about JPEG XL advantages, if you want to learn a bit more: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FlWjf8asI4Y
To increase adoption they should not have limited this to the latest iPhone models. Why on earth can a one year old iPhone 15’s CPU not handle encoding JXL? It can encode 4K video in real time, so this should be no problem at all, right?
I’d guess hardware acceleration could have something to do with it
I don't know, but my guesswork is that the DNG/ProRAW/JXL support comes with compatibility challenges. Limiting the size of the launch to well-informed photography prosumers and professionals will help to iron out the compatibility challenges — rather than make all confused consumers face these challenges at once.
I don't think that hardware support plays a role here. The fastest encoding modes of JPEG XL are ridiculously fast on software, and Apple's CPUs seem powerful enough.
In lossy mode I think there is no difference between AVIF, HEIC or JXL. AVIF is even a little bit ahead.
For lossless mode, JXL's fast modes (-e1 and -e2) are fast. But their compression ratio is terrible. The higher levels are not usable in a camera in terms of speed. Of course, my favorite and many people's favorite in this regard is HALIC (High Availability Lossless Image Compression). It is a speed/compression monster. The problem is that for now it is closed source and there is no Google or similar company behind it.
The CPU isn’t used for encoding video
Encoding a single image with the CPU takes nothing compared to modern video codecs.
This, I just don't understand why it seems only latest iPhones got this.
I also don't know, but I suspect the fact that Apple not only develops the OS, but also sells the devices, might have something to do with it...
Crystal clear case of faked obsolescence, a major cause for environmental damage.
Costing the planet our future sustainability in the name of greed.
And all you have to say about it is a snark?
Reading the whole piece a few days ago, it's a pretty good overview of the promises of JPEG XL.
Apart from that, Apple's POV and PR bits being given such a central role felt a bit weird, especially as petapixel already spotted Samsung adopting JPEG XL months before Apple.
Aside from the petty "who was first" bickering, it's a completely different move to adopt a common standard already accepted by rival companies on the android side, and it means we can really expect a larger adoption of JPEG XL than the other standards Apple just pitched on its own.
That was the biggest beacon of hope IMHO, it would have benefited from more prominence.
Attaching any significance to being “first” on open standards is a game Apple rarely plays, but which others impose upon them because Apple’s adoption is (rightly or wrongly) seen as the most consequential and/or most newsworthy inflection point.
In the specific case of JPEG XL I think Google support will be the real inflection point: no chrome and default android support is a deal breaker for wide audience content publishers.
The ironic part being of course that Chrome used to support it way too early, but support was dropped as nobody followed. So yes, Apple support is a big deal, but not more consequential than the other actors of the pretty vast ecosystems.
I don’t have iphone 16, and this article puzzles me.
Is apple only using jxl for their “raw” camera capture, but not regular camera capture?? The non-raw use case seems to be the one that would have more impact to regular folks.
Why? Is jxl inferior to HEIC?
ProRAW files are large, so there's more potential to save space, making ProRAW a more attractive feature to use for a wider audience. From the average consumer's perspective, JPEG XL offers less of a benefit as a replacement for HEIC, but my guess is that it will eventually replace HEIC when it's more widely adopted. ProRAW is a less compatible file format to begin with and geared toward a certain type of user, so it's an easier place to start, whereas replacing HEIC with JPEG XL might cause confusion and annoyance.
JPEG XL also supports re-encoding existing JPEG files to decrease file size while keeping the original file quality. That really seems like useful feature but so far I haven’t seen any tooling (in macOS) to re-encode my existing photo library.
It would be safe to assume that Apple will eventually add a way to recompress your photo library to JXL… if they weren’t in the business of selling storage and cloud storage. They have in the past released tools to optimize storage so it wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary, but… I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Thank god they went with a standard this time. When they launched HEIC, there wasn’t a single workable open source decoder. Hell, there wasn’t even a single non-Apple decoder.
XL color depth looks amazing.
An annoying oversight is that while my Fujifilm camera is modern enough to shoot HEIF+RAW, Apple Photos only knows to group JPEG+RAW as a single photo. Because Apple did not spend a day of engineering time bringing feature parity for the file format they themselves promoted, it has turned into a bigger feature to match and merge the HEIF and RAW assets after the fact. After several years, I'm growing doubtful they'll ever accomplish it.
I have yet to see whether they did it right with JXL+RAW (or is it DNG+RAW?) but hopefully they will before it becomes available in mainstream cameras.
HEIC is a standard too - it wasn’t a secret internal Apple project…
It might be a standard, but for a long time the licensing costs were exorbitant, and that likely stifled adoption. While licensing costs have come down, the pushback against HEIC’s pricing led to the development of better, royalty-free alternatives—including JPEG XL. Thank god they went with an unencumbered standard this time.
Windows showing you a popup saying you need to buy a £0.79 windows add on to just open photos taken with an iPhone was always unbelievable. Like some kind of malware or something.
In what context was thisnprompt appearing. I can not think of a time I have ever struggled to be able to open a photo from my iPhone in any of the apps I commonly use. Is this a Windows application issue or an OS issue, and how were the photos coming to your machine?
Just to clarify, this is an honest question not sarcasm.
If you directly download the HEIC photos to your windows PC.
The iPhone tends to convert to jpeg whenever you email/whatsapp/etc a photo, so it's only direct file import that nets the original HEIC file.
Exactly, I'd upload a bunch of photos to Google Drive to download to my PC, Google Drive could open them fine, but the default windows photo viewer app would demand payment to open them.
Thank god they went with a standard because when they went with a standard it wasn’t widespread?
What?
Some more recent developments around browser support: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-Interest-JPEG-XL-Rust
Firefox Nightly is listed as supported on the jpegxl.info web site. My understanding is that it does not fully support the specification yet which is why it is not released to production.
https://jpegxl.info/resources/supported-software.html
Weirdly enough, JPEG-XL support is actually fairly decent in Firefox already and there were patches developed by the community that work well for things such as color profiles, animation support etc. I’ve had them in Waterfox for a few years now - it was a purely “political” decision, if you want to call it that, to stop any more progress until recently.
Man this back and forth is really frustrating.
So Google killed XL a while ago already and I feel like either Microsoft or Mozilla at least considered following suit. After Apple has done heic for a while now I assumed it might go that way regarding a jpeg replacement, but now they did a 180 and switched to xl. I mean good, it's not as patent encumbered, but wtf am I supposed to expect for the future now? Will Google add XL back to chrome? I guess it will take another decade or five until we have a jpeg replacement that's being universally agreed upon, because come on, it would be too easy if we don't get another plot twist where a major player jumps onto something else again for a while.
How does JPEG XL compare to Apple’s current default HEIC? Is HEIC eventually going away in favor of JPEG XL?
I can’t wait for animated JPEG XL to replace animated GIF.
Is part of the reason patents / licensing issues with HEVC that makes it harder to adopt?
They already adopted it 7 years ago so no.
For one you can't use Chrome to view those photos.
note: the format was co-developed by Google who also makes Chome.
Indeed, but Chrome removed support for the format some time ago.
Cries in iPhone11Pro … also WTF!? Why not make QOK format and x266 available and exclusive to iPhone17
please tell me this means chromium will un-drop jxl and we can just stick them on the web like png/jpg/gif
The article states that because the file sizes are smaller the format is more environmentally friendly because, they state, "All that stuff lives somewhere, and wherever it is, it requires energy to operate."
Cold storage exists, as well as different tiers of storage. The hard drive on my shelf isn't using any energy. Are they storing all of their images in RAM? Maybe you could say this would lead to less use of storage space so less use of raw materials for storage devices.
I would posit that it is possible this format is less environmentally friendly because it takes more compute cycles to produce the output from the compressed data, but I have no real insight into this just intuition.
If people are going to take credit for crunching something down from 10 MB to 8 MB, I wish they'd also take the blame for massively bloating something into a modern monstrosity out of sheer laziness or betting that profit margins will be higher if they waste user time, storage, and cpu for the sake of releasing the project faster.
Most iPhone users would be storing photos in iCloud.
And most professionals are storing their photos in Creative Cloud.
And in both cases the photo data would be replicated on multiple hard drives for redundancy. So it would definitely be more environmentally friendly to have smaller photos.
The more important reason is that cloud storage costs significantly more than local.
> Are they storing all of their images in RAM?
Consider the millions of iPhone users uploading new photos and scrolling their iCloud-hosted photo library. A substantial amount of photo data is in RAM at any given moment, spread across many network devices.
> I would posit that it is possible this format is less environmentally friendly because it takes more compute cycles
I'm curious how much energy it takes to send bits over cellular or wifi, my intuition is that this is orders of magnitude higher than compression or encoding.
> The hard drive on my shelf isn't using any energy
But it is losing its data: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41244143>
> Are they storing all of their images in RAM?
That part would not matter regardless. RAM is powered at all times, kept being refreshed too. Unless, of course you mean, they'd have to keep buying new machines to store more pictures.
On the other hand, we have industry defined standards to compress TCP headers [1] - incurring a cost to compress/decompress but resulting in lower packet sizes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_Header_Compression
What is environmentally (OK, mentally) unfriendly to me is the creation of new formats that various apps, and notably, websites where I post images, can't handle, so I swear a bit, convert the image to jpeg or png, and post.
People are part of the environment, too!
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. ... Thoreau.
> The hard drive on my shelf isn't using any energy.
When it filled up you put it on a shelf and bought a new one.
That's essentially what I do with my RAW files. One hard drive per year. It's still less expensive than every cloud storage I looked at.
You guys do do read tests occasionally, and transfer the data old drives to newer drives right?
I hope you get two at least. Backups needed.
This whataboutism we are hearing now about "the energy needed to store your pictures" is just corporate whataboutism, trying to push blame onto consumers.
Let's say you have 2 TB of photos stored. If that's consuming more than 2 watts of electricity on average, the cloud providers have to be quite incompetent (they are mostly not).
2 watts is 1 kWh in 20 days, so 18 kWh in one year. The emissions from 18 kWh in the US is around 6 kg of CO2. This is the equivalent of driving a car for about 20 minutes on the highway, one time per year. Or spending 5 minutes longer in the shower 4 times per year.
Yes, yes, but 48mP only, when will they finally have 240MP on a sensor that can be mounted on the ass of an ant. But double the protrusion 6 times I guess for the lens supporting the new tech and whatnot (tele-macro at night in a panoramic sport event!), it may even take picture for you without thinking taking a picture, you purchased a smartphone didn't you, let it be smart then, it will know better than you what you need, how you need it, and when you need it, all is necessary to fix it to your forehead so it can see what you see, tiny bitsy inconvenience beyond storing and managing the billboard sized but polaroid quality stream of pics vomited out by the device - never to see the most.
This good photo = phone deception marketers pushed on idiotic customers who actually pay the premium for the marketing material is pathetic.