Spent a few hours in the pouring rain last week protesting with about 120 other folks down at City Hall.
One guy came up and was reading our signs. He said he was an immigrant to the US for 10 years and in his entire time of being here he’s never seen something so “insane”. He couldn’t believe what is happening in the White House and thanked us for showing up.
Another gentleman was a military veteran who spent the entire two hours walking with his partner from corner to corner with a large visible sign. He was very stoic, yet friendly, individual.
A lot of horn honk and thumbs up including one from a school bus and a firetruck, which was very amazing. I’m pretty sure the firetruck wasn’t supposed to be doing that. 🙂
It felt good to get out of the house and be around other people. To do something other than doom scroll and read sarcasm and defeat on social media.
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.
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. 🙃
Addendum 2:
A few days later. To test my download-RAW-support-as-needed theory I downloaded some sample RAW images from a Canon EOS R5 II, a camera I’ve never used before. As soon as I started the download the mystery blue sync icon appeared. Photos opened the image without issue.
I use Apple Photos to manage my photo library and for most of my editing needs as well. It Just Works™ and at this point I’ve been using it and various incarnations for nearly 20 years. 3
I’m aware of all the other solutions and variables available to me to manage to my library and have more robust editing features at my fingertips. All require some sort of subscription and invariably a learning curve. I’m not against subscriptions! Part of the reason I’m writing this blog post is to talk about my subscription to Apple’s iCloud, but the learning curve is more than I’m interested in taking on at the moment.
Not to mention, and this is a big “not to mention”, I really enjoy the integration Apple Photos has in my computing experience. My library is there on all my devices; laptop, phone, tablet, and even TV! Fully, not just a part of it. It’s full-featured enough (adjustments, cropping, keywords, smart albums…kinda). My wife and I can co-manage a single library instead of squirting photos to one another ad-hoc. And again, it works 99% of the time.4 I do have Pixelmator Pro and a handful of otherspecialty apps I use when needed, but for the majority of my needs, it’s great.
I’ve been taking a lot more photos recently. Due in part by my chronic GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) affecting me with another camera this year, but more largely due to the passing of my father and the desire to do something with my hands and mind that isn’t sitting in front of a screen. Even though the camera has a screen and I edit on a large monitor…well, you know what I’m saying. Instead of sitting in front of a screen and passively consuming. Which I still do plenty of if my Playstation, Nintendo, and Netflix profiles are to be believed. Fifty hours playing that‽5
Recently though – again, new camera this year and more photos taken than normal as a result – I’ve noticed that we were creeping up against the 2 TB capacity of our current iCloud storage option. We’re all in, subscribing to Apple One, which gives us 2 TB for everything – photos, messages, files, backups, etc. But this begged the question of what to do.
Do I cull duplicate photos from my library? A tiresome and monotonous experience. Do I remove all large video files from my photo library and shunt them into a never-seen-again folder on my Synology NAS? Do I finally delete the old Messages? Never!
I decided to solve this problem in the most direct way possible. I spent more money. At the encouragement of my loving wife, I’ve added an additional 2 TB of cloud storage to our subscription; at a rate of an additional $9.99 a month. This gives us (really me, I’m the problem) plenty of headroom and space to stretch out.
Side note: Here’s to hoping in the near future that Apple figures out some ML tool that shrinks RAW files losslessly or suggests which nearly identical photo from a set of five can be deleted. Maybe something for blurry photos or all white/all black accidental shots. Or else I’m going to regret not culling the library now rather than in 10 years.
Thinking about all of this gave me an idea.
With Apple Photos I can create smart albums based upon criteria to determine how many photos I take every year on average and how large those yearly additions are. I can then use this data to make a rough estimate of how many photos I’ll accumulate over the next decade or so and how much storage space that will take up.
The first step is to create a handful of smart albums with two rules. Photos captured within a year timeframe and excluding videos.
The second bit is to export, by hand, that data into a spreadsheet and create a chart.
Pandemic slump in 2020, 2021, and 2022?
The result is that I can estimate that by 2034, ten years from now, I’ll have a library of photos that is nearly 1.4 terabytes in size. We’ll see if I use up more of the 4 TB of storage I now have – with photos or other stuff. 1.4 terabytes is a little less than the current size of my Photos library, which includes 1,721 video files as well. So I’ll probably be above the estimate, but I think within 4 TB.
2006, 2012 and 2024 were new camera years (D40, D800, X100VI)
I can also estimate how many photos that will be. Not to be too precise, but right now I have 66,420 photos. If I add the average of 3,063 images a year to my library – which includes all sorts of images6, this report doesn’t separate out iPhone photos vs “camera” photos nor does it sort out screenshots, photos for documentation (receipts), or duplicates – I’ll have amassed nearly a hundred thousand photos by 2034. A nice round number.
Of note, this is all calculating starting from 2004. I could go back further than 2004, but that seemed like a good date to pick (20 years) and metadata gets less reliable. Older cameras forgot the date and time more frequently back in the day.
So, like all predictions of the future, I doubt I have this right. I surmise I’ll probably exceed these estimates. Will I use up more than 4TB in ten years? I doubt it, but I also feel like I might be bumping up against that in a decade. But also, who knows‽ Maybe I tire of photography (doubtful!), maybe storage goes quantum and we measure things in petabytes. Maybe Apple increases the storage for the price. ಠ_ಠ
I will say that instead of worrying about managing my library it was far easier – and yes I’m aware of the privilege – to expand beyond the default 2 TB option I had been paying for and give myself some space, and grace.
Apple has successfully kept a lot of its Camera app paradigms rooted in traditional concepts of photography. Portrait mode features f-stops for its depth effect; lenses are described in full-frame equivalent focal lengths. This stuff matters: it exposes users, even casual ones, to the fundamentals of photography. Through the most popular camera, everyone continues to be educated about these things and can learn what they mean in a very hands-on manner.
