The RAW Fix Apple Never Announced

Fujifilm compressed RAW decodes on iOS/macOS 26.2 and later. Nikon HE and HE* decode on 26.4.1 and later. Sony lossless compressed decodes too. The α7 V’s lossy compressed and compressed HQ modes still do not.

Every so often Apple asks us what we'd like from them as a developer. For years one of our top requests was adding support for compressed RAW. People were shooting it on new Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony bodies, and we couldn't open the files.

The email reply we had to keep sending for years looked like this: Although your camera is on our and Apple’s supported list. Your compressed RAW files are not.

Most commonly that went out to Fujifilm shooters whose new camera sat on Apple's compatibility page while compressed RAFs weren't editable. Since Darkroom's RAW support is dependent on Apple's RAW engine, if Apple's engine can't read the file, neither can we.

We found out by putting files through the decoder.

What is Compressed RAW?

A RAW file is a direct data readout from your camera's CCD or CMOS sensor. About 80MB for a 40-megapixel frame, which is why cameras offer to shrink it. Lossless is close to a zip: bit-for-bit identical, and about 20–40% smaller. Lossy throws away some image detail to shrink the file. Fujifilm's "compressed," Nikon's HE and HE*, Sony's compressed HQ are all lossy, and get you roughly 50–70% storage savings. Camera manufacturers use compressed RAW not only to save storage space, but also to increase the amount of frames they can buffer in memory before writing to the card.

The problem is that the file extension doesn't tell whether a file is compressed or not. A .NEF can be uncompressed, lossless, HE, or HE*. A RAW decoder like Apple's that handles one of those can simultaneously not have the ability to handle the others, which is how a camera ends up supported at one compression setting and unreadable at another.

What we tested

We tested 26 RAW files from nine Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony bodies (most from the community archive raw.pixls.us) through Apple's public CIRAWFilter API, the same path Darkroom uses. A file counted if it rendered from real sensor data at full resolution and responded to exposure and white balance. The embedded JPEG didn't count. 11 RAW files decoded on iOS 18.5. 24 RAW files decoded on iOS 26.5.

Fujifilm started working on iOS/macOS 26.2. Nikon HE and HE* on 26.4.1, which matches Thom Hogan's 26.4 note. The α7 V's lossy compressed and compressed HQ modes still don't decode. Adobe hasn't shipped those either, so this one may be waiting on Sony. Stay on Lossless Comp on that body for now.

Apple's support page

We couldn't find a release note, a developer note, a support article, or a mention in a WWDC session. Just like us, people noticed by accident. A Nikon shooter hit space on a file that had never previewed and it previewed. The post starts with "this isn't in the release notes." Hogan wrote the line that sent us to the Wayback Machine: "Curiously, Apple has not updated their page on what is supported to reflect this."

So we pulled the archived copies of that page.

In the December 2025 version, every Fujifilm body still had footnote 1: "Uncompressed RAW format only." The Z8, Z9 and Zf had "Lossless RAW format only." By February the Fujifilm one is gone and the remaining footnotes are renumbered. The Nikon one was still there in June, three months after HE* was already working, and it's gone from the current page.

Why it sat for years

It was never that Apple couldn't do it. Adobe has decoded Fujifilm compressed for years. So have RAW Power, the open-source decoders, and Pixelmator, before Apple bought them. We looked at shipping our own decoder more than once. We don't have the people to support per-camera decoding for the rest of the app's life, so we kept asking Apple.

A little birdie told us, months before any of this shipped, that the holdup was most likely due to licensing.

Nikon is a good example. HE and HE* sit on TicoRAW, a patented codec Nikon licenses from intoPIX. To provide support for it, Apple would have needed a licensing deal. Our guess is they didn't want to turn on one brand and leave the other two stranded, as that would make the compatibility page even less useful. It would also fit the timeline: nothing for years, then Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony inside about four months.

WWDC likely wouldn't have caught it anyway. At WWDC26 Apple reported RAW support as a count of camera models, 784 of them, and the X-T5 and Z8 were already in that number. The thing that changed was the compression mode, which doesn't show up in that metric.

What about DNG?

A lot of this mess is specific to vendor RAW. As an example, Leica's M, Q, and SL lines shoot .DNG. Ricoh's GR does too, and Pentax lets you pick. Apple gives basic DNG support to files from any camera, including ones they've never listed. No extra compression footnote. It even became an ISO standard this past March.

DNG has had lossless compression from the start, and since 1.7 it can use JPEG XL for lossy compression. Apple already ships that stack: ProRAW is a flavor of DNG, and the iPhone 16 Pro can write a 48-megapixel file as JPEG XL, about 45MB lossless or 20MB lossy, down from 80MB.

Try the files again

If you shoot Fujifilm, you can finally stop forcing uncompressed just so Darkroom will open the photo. That starts on iOS/macOS 26.2. If you shoot Nikon, the camera default is fine on 26.4.1 or later, which is when HE and HE* started decoding. If you have a folder you imported once and couldn't edit, open it again on those versions. On a Sony α7 V, stay on Lossless Comp.

Thank you to whoever at Apple got this over the line. A lot of people are still shooting uncompressed because the last time they checked, they had to.

The Darkroom Team