The RAW Fix Apple Never Announced

Every so often, Apple asks us what we'd like from them as a developer. For years we gave the same answer every single time: support compressed RAW. Always top of our list. Just let people open the files their cameras were already making.

Because the alternative was writing this email: Your camera is on Apple’s supported list. Your files are not. There’s nothing we can do.

That went to Fujifilm shooters whose X-T5 was right there on Apple’s compatibility page, but whose compressed RAF files opened as grey rectangles. And to Nikon shooters whose Z8 was listed, but whose HE* files — the format Nikon ships as the default on that camera — went nowhere. We develop your photos through Apple’s RAW engine, so when that engine can't read a file, we're stuck too.

Good news: it's fixed. Fujifilm compressed RAF, Nikon High Efficiency NEF and Sony α7 V lossless compressed all decode now. Weird news: nobody told us. Or you. Or, as far as we can tell, anyone.

First, What Is Compressed RAW?

A RAW file is the unprocessed readout from your sensor — about 80MB for a 40-megapixel frame, so cameras offer to shrink it. Lossless is basically zipping it: bit-for-bit identical, 20–40% smaller. Lossy throws away detail the engineers bet you'll never notice — Fujifilm's "compressed," Nikon's HE and HE*, Sony's compressed HQ — and saves 50–70%.

And no, big SSDs don't make this moot: it was never about disk space. On a Z8, lossless fills the buffer after 81 frames. HE* gets you 599. Compression is what lets the camera keep shooting.

Here's the catch that caused a decade of confusion: they're all the same file extension. A .NEF might be uncompressed, lossless, HE or HE*, and a decoder that reads one has done precisely nothing toward reading the others. Each of those compression settings is its own puzzle — which is how a camera ends up perfectly supported at one setting and unreadable at another, with nothing in the filename to warn you.

What We Know That Works Now

We ran 26 RAW files from nine popular camera bodies, from the 3 biggest camera manufacturers (most from the community-run sample archive raw.pixls.us) through Apple's public CIRAWFilter API — the same path Darkroom uses. Files had to render from real sensor data at full resolution and respond to exposure and white balance; the embedded JPEG preview didn't count. The set went from 11 files decoding on iOS 18.5 to 24 on iOS 26.5.

Fujifilm's files started working in the 26.2 cycle, Nikon's HE and HE* by 26.4.1 — matching Thom Hogan's report of a 26.4 arrival. The α7 V's remaining compression settings are the one real gap, and it looks deliberate: Adobe hasn't shipped them either. Stay on Lossless Comp for now.

Nobody Said Anything

We looked. No release note. No developer note. No support article. No WWDC talk. No post.

Like us, everyone who found out found out by accident. One Nikon shooter hit the space bar out of habit on a file that had never previewed before — and it previewed. His post opens with "this isn't in the release notes." Hogan noted the change and added the line that sent us digging: "Curiously, Apple has not updated their page on what is supported to reflect this."

So we compared every archived version of that page. The only record Apple kept of this work is a series of sentences quietly disappearing.

In the December 2025 version, every Fujifilm body carries footnote 1: "Uncompressed RAW format only." The Z8, Z9 and Zf carry "Lossless RAW format only." Those two sentences are the whole reason we spent years writing that email. By February the Fujifilm caveat is just… gone, deleted outright, the survivors renumbered around the hole it left. The Nikon one held on past June, three months after HE* demonstrably worked, and is finally absent from today's page.

That's it. That's the announcement. Just the slow, silent withdrawal of the sentence saying your files didn't work.

So Why Was It Ever Broken?

It was never that Apple couldn't. Adobe shipped Fujifilm compressed years ago; so did RAW Power, the open-source crowd, and Pixelmator — before Apple bought them. We looked at going around Apple's decoder more than once and never had the expertise or the people to own per-camera decoding forever. So we kept asking.

A little birdie told us — months before any of this quietly shipped — that the holdup had mostly been about licensing. For a decade we assumed we were losing an argument about priorities. It wasn't an argument. It was a negotiation, and it was never ours to have.

Nikon shows the shape of it. HE and HE* were never Nikon's to hand over: they're built on TicoRAW, a patented codec Nikon licenses from intoPIX. Not a puzzle to crack, a contract to sign. Our guess is the category was gated on the hardest of those deals — support one brand, strand the rest, and you get a compatibility page nobody trusts. Which fits the timing: nothing for years, then three brands in four months.

And the silence? There was nothing to announce. At WWDC26 Apple counts RAW support in camera models — 784 of them — and by that measure nothing happened: the X-T5 and Z8 were already listed. The fix was real, but format-shaped, and Apple has nowhere to put format-shaped news.

And Then There's .DNG

None of this had to exist. Leica's M, Q and SL lines just shoot .DNG — Ricoh's GR does the same, Pentax lets you pick — and Apple grants basic support to DNG from any camera, sight unseen. No secret compression settings, no footnote. March of this year it even became an ISO standard.

DNG can compress too — losslessly since day one, and since 1.7 with JPEG XL. Apple already ships this: ProRAW is a flavour of DNG, and since the iPhone 16 Pro a 48-megapixel file can be JPEG XL, roughly 45MB lossless or 20MB lossy, down from 80MB. Which is the whole saga in one sentence. Apple was selling a phone that writes lossy compressed RAW in an open codec a year before it could read Fujifilm's, and eighteen months before Nikon's.

What To Do About It

If you shoot Fujifilm, stop shooting uncompressed to keep Darkroom happy. If you shoot Nikon, shoot the format your camera defaults to. And dig out that folder you gave up on — the one you imported once, saw nothing, and abandoned. Decoding improvements are retroactive: the photos didn't change, what can read them did.

And genuinely — thank you, Apple. This is unglamorous work with no demo moment attached, and someone fought for it. With RAW 9 landing in the next major release, the team is clearly investing here again. We'd just love the next fix to come with a sentence attached, because some photographers are still working around a limitation that no longer exists.

To everyone who kept asking whether their camera would ever work: you were right to keep bugging us. We were bugging Apple the whole time.

The Darkroom Team