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

[nesk_]

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

[hajhatten]

Was just about to see if someone mentioned this video. Really good explanation comparing JPEG XL vs AVIF.

[trompetenaccoun]

This may be a naive question but can't we have the features of JPEG XL combined with the compression algorithm of AVIF? Why does it have to be one or the other? Size clearly matters, especially for the majority of the world's population who do not have access to super fast internet and TBs of storage. It's definitely a luxury not having to care about file sizes.

[b15h0p]

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?

[WhyNotHugo]

This is how they sell new phones. The grand majority of new features don't require the latest hardware, but artificially restricting it increases sales of new phones. None technical people can't usually tell the difference between hardware and software clearly enough to understand this nasty trick.

[alwillis]

From the article:

    As Apple explains on the new iPhone models, JPEG XL files are supported
    on iOS 17 and later and macOS 14 and later.

JPEG XL isn't limited to the latest phones; just a phone that can run iOS 17 or later. I have used JPEG XL on my iPhone 13 mini with no issues. iOS 17 runs on the iPhone XS (2018) or newer.

The difference is JPEG XL is now part of the Apple's image pipeline for the camera in iPhone 16.

Any 3rd party photo app developer can support JPEG XL if they wish.

[jiggawatts]

One of the tricks for achieving the target battery life is that photo and video formats are offloaded to dedicated and very power-efficient hardware in all mobile devices. The iPhone 16 is the first to get hardware offload for AV1 and JXL, which is why it'll support these formats.

It's not just software, unlike in the PC world where going from 5W hardware decode to 50W software decode basically doesn't matter.

[account42]

The "CPU" (that is, the generic compute part) cannot encode 4K video in real time, that part is handle by codec-specific HW.

[NinoScript]

I’d guess hardware acceleration could have something to do with it

[cchi_co]

It does seem odd to restrict new features to the latest models, especially when older ones still have powerful capabilities.

[the4anoni]

This, I just don't understand why it seems only latest iPhones got this.

[FollowingTheDao]

This makes me think: If JPEG-XL needs more computing power to decompress, does that out weigh the ecological benefit benefit of the smaller file size?

[brigade]

The CPU isn’t used for encoding video

[makeitdouble]

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.

[simondotau]

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.

[alwillis]

… especially as petapixel already spotted Samsung adopting JPEG XL months before Apple.

JPEG XL was added to iOS 17 and macOS 14 last year [1].

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10122

[ksec]

In terms of JPEG XL Lossless, Camera makers are already or has plan to adopt the format as RAW. In that space I think the adoption roadmap is quite good.

[scosman]

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.

[rgovostes]

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.

[happyopossum]

HEIC is a standard too - it wasn’t a secret internal Apple project…

[masklinn]

Thank god they went with a standard because when they went with a standard it wasn’t widespread?

What?

[modeless]

> 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.

[sho]

Some more recent developments around browser support: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-Interest-JPEG-XL-Rust

[thecosmicfrog]

> Compared to a standard JPEG, a JPEG XL file is up to 55% smaller

I still find JPEG "XL" to be such a bizarre name. I would intuitively think it would result in larger file sizes.

[amy-petrik-214]

JPEG XL is a great name from a marketing perspective. The Apple roadmap has several successor compressors with AI elements in the planning sheet - JPEG XL PLUS, JPEG XL MAX. These formats will have small nominal yearly licensing fees to use. Finally, the most advanced format will be JPEG XXXL which they are developing in collaboration with pornhub.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Although it might seem confusing at first glance, having your selling point as "our file sizes are larger!" is so counterintuitive, that I think it's obviously not that!

[bmicraft]

The XL probably relates to the fact that the relative savings increase with higher res pictures. Whereas original jpeg's file size might have scaled linearly, jxl could do better than that.

[1000100_1000101]

Lets just call it JPEG 40 to avoid any confusion.

[illiac786]

Even weirder, L stands for legacy.

[praseodym]

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.

[cherioo]

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?

[larrysalibra]

How does JPEG XL compare to Apple’s current default HEIC? Is HEIC eventually going away in favor of JPEG XL?

[dsego]

> Compared to JPEG XL, HEIC — an implementation of HEIF — is just not good.

I would've loved an explanation with this statement.

[TiredOfLife]

For one you can't use Chrome to view those photos.

note: the format was co-developed by Google who also makes Chome.

[lonjil]

I don't think you can use Chrome to view any raw image files...

[swiftcoder]

Indeed, but Chrome removed support for the format some time ago.

[astrange]

Isn't it a little early to write this article? They haven't tried the implementation yet.

[EasyMark]

Isn’t Samsung generally ahead of apple on most technical fronts though? Especially on mobile, I think people usually just assume apple just spends more effort on refining it, which is not a bad rule of thumb, but certainly not always the truth.

[7e]

I can’t wait for animated JPEG XL to replace animated GIF.

[weiliddat]

Is part of the reason patents / licensing issues with HEVC that makes it harder to adopt?

[0x69420]

please tell me this means chromium will un-drop jxl and we can just stick them on the web like png/jpg/gif

[lencastre]

Cries in iPhone11Pro … also WTF!? Why not make QOK format and x266 available and exclusive to iPhone17

[mihaaly]

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.