Does iPadOS support uncompressed RAW files from the Fujifilm X100VI? Documentation says yes, experience said no!
With the latest release of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3.1 I finally have support for uncompressed RAW files from my Fujifilm X100VI on my iPad. A camera that is now a year old. Grumble grumble. This is great news, but I had quite a strange experience getting it to work.
For the past year I’ve had to use a “real” computer to transmogrify my camera’s RAW files – in their native .RAF file format – into DNG files in order to work with the images. I used the handy Adobe Digital Negative Converter to accomplish this. It’s free and quick to do, but not something I could do natively on my iPad.
This meant I couldn’t use my iPad, or if necessary my iPhone, to edit these RAW files in Apple Photos. I prefer to travel flight and not take my laptop with me so an iPad is a perfect companion when traveling away from home.
When I heard that iPadOS now has support for my camera, I went and took some test photos and tried to import them into photos on my iPad. Unfortunately, when I went to import these images into the Photos app, I was greeted with a boring grey rectangle instead of the actual images!
I restarted my device, checked to make sure I was using the latest version (18.3.1), and even downloaded sample RAW/RAF files from DPReview to test. I also double checked that I was shooting in uncompressed RAW and not compressed RAW, which remain unsupported on Apple devices.
I thought, either the documentation is wrong, I did something wrong – possible, but highly unlikely – or there’s a snafu somewhere in the support of these files.
I posted a message on Apple’s support forums asking if anyone else had an idea or could test this situation to confirm.1
A few hours later I figured out what is happening. I think. Apple stuff often “just works”, but when it doesn’t – or when it doesn’t clearly indicate it’s doing something – your experience can get wonky. Good news is that my iPad does support the X100VI RAW files! The confusing part is that this appears to be an undocumented feature of the (latest?) OSes that was a little slow to catch up.
While I was trying to import these RAW files, for the first time I’ll note, into Photos on my iPad I saw an icon appear near the wi-fi and battery status in the top bar. An icon I had never seen before. It was blue and had a gear icon surrounded by two arrows. It appears that my iPad was trying to sync something, but it was unclear as to what. I searched the web to see if I could find an explanation for this icon and lo and behold, I found a post in the very same Apple Community forums.
A few hours later I went back to my iPad, opened Photos, and guess what? The images were loading and could be viewed and edited.
I think what I have stumbled upon is a new feature in iPadOS. Instead of having RAW support for every possible camera included in the OS (or downloaded as part of an update) Apple has decided to instead download support for the camera’s RAW files on an as-needed basis. This makes sense from a storage perspective. It also explained the gear/sync icon that was new to me (and others, judging by the link above). This is a little confusing from a user perspective – if things aren’t instant or described well to the user you have guess what is happening. Patience is a virtue I suppose. 🙂
So, all is well on my end. A funny – not ha ha, but weird – experience and lesson learned about how Apple software works (or doesn’t?) :p
Addendum:
I think this also applies to older versions of MacOS, like Sonoma. I have an older iMac that is being kept alive thanks to the great open-source OpenCore Legacy Patcher project. It’s a 2017 5K iMac running Sonoma. 2 I can now open these RAF files in Photos on Sonoma and they work, even if Apple’s page on Sonoma support says it does not. 🙃