Apple iPhones With iOS 11 Will Have Better Camera Formats, Save Storage

Apple made many announcements at the World Wide Developers Conference 2017 (WWDC 2017) on Monday, where it also launched its new operating system – iOS 11. One important announcement the company made was that with iOS 11, it introduced two new camera formats — HEVC and HEIF, which it claims would save at least 50 percent storage space on the device, without any loss in image quality.

Apple instructed developers to start supporting HEIF and HEVC in their applications Thursday. To support the formats, iOS devices need at least an A9 processor.

Read: iOS 11 Release Date Features: Highlights From Latest iPhone OS At WWDC 2017

iPhone users have been forever complaining about the lack of storage space and storage options on the device. Unlike many Android devices, Apple does not support an external SD card on its devices.

But why is Apple changing its camera formats and what are HEVC and HEIF?

Apple has been, for a long time using an h.264 video compression for videos and JPG for images. The introduction of HEVC and HEIF at this point might be an indication of the upcoming iPhone 8’s camera. The iPhone 8 is expected to have a dual-camera.

Apple has been using the HEVC format for its FaceTime app starting with the iPhone 6. The use of the format resulted in cleaner and clearer videos.

HEIF or High Efficiency Image File Format is a file format which was finalized in 2015, while HEVC or High Efficiency Video Coding has been around for long. These formats allow Apple to improve image and video quality, while not affecting the device’s storage as they only use half the storage of previous formats. This makes the device more capable of live streaming too, since it can endure the bandwidth better.

HEVC and HEIF are expected to lead up to the HDR10 format, which will need a device to be capable of playing HEVC video and support 10-bit graphics. Two of Apple’s new devices, announced at WWDC 2017 — the new iPad Pro and the new iMac. The iPad Pro supports HDR video, while the new iMac supports 10-Buit graphics. All of these features are expected to eventually be ported to its flagship device.

According to Streaming Media, Apple might even re-encode its entire library including SD and HD videos, which would result in small files streaming to an Apple TV or iOS device. This would in turn, make for smoother streaming and users will have to worry less about data speeds while streaming.

Read: AirPods iOS 11 Update: Headphones Will Automatically Sync With Apple TV With tvOS 11, Plus More

If you have signed up for iOS 11 Beta 1, you can check the feature out, by navigating to Settings -> Camera -> Formats. You will find HEIC and HEVC under the High Efficiency Format.

iOS11 is currently in Beta, but the public preview of the operating system is expected to release later this month, with a full scale launch expected in September.