JPEG XL The new iPhone 16 image format that will save you money
The iPhone 16 comes with a few small camera features that many haven’t noticed, and there’s one very exciting one that could save you a lot of money and put an end to one of the most tedious issues with Apple’s phones: storage. The company now lets you shoot in JPEG XL format, which has two important advantages over JPEG. But what is this format really?
JPEG XL with the extension (.jxl) is a relatively new standard for file encoding. In fact, it began to be used in 2022, when different operating systems, such as macOS, created compatibility with this image format. In fact, today, popular applications such as Final Cut or Lightroom support it, and we repeat that the iPhone 16 can now also take photos in this format.
One of the main advantages of JPEG XL is that the image quality is slightly higher than traditional JPEG files. In addition, the file sizes are much smaller. According to the data provided , JPEG XL is up to 55% smaller than JPEG while offering higher quality.
This is particularly useful not only for freeing up space on your smartphone’s internal storage, which in turn allows you to save money by doing away with iCloud or another cloud storage service. It is also useful because it allows you to post high-quality images on websites without affecting factors such as the aforementioned page load time. In addition, the smaller size has an impact on the environmental impact by allowing less data to be uploaded and, at the same time, less energy.
However, there is a small drawback. The JPEG XL format is not as standardized as the traditional JPEG, so not many applications and platforms support it yet. In any case, Apple is making efforts to make this extension more popular thanks to its benefits. In fact, we repeat that the iPhone 16 includes an option that allows users to save photos in this format. In addition, it is compatible with iOS 17 and later, as well as macOS 14 and later.
.jfif)
However, the JPEG committee ensures that traditional JPEG files can be transcoded losslessly to JPEG XL, allowing for reduced file size without compromising quality. Furthermore, they claim that they "can be restored to the exact same JPEG file, ensuring backward compatibility with JPEG-based applications."