You should stop taking JPEG photos on your iPhone

Innovative smartphone camera sensors can deliver impressive image quality despite their small size, but it comes at a price — more detailed shots require more digital space for storage. The average 24MP photo captured with a modern iPhone is about 3MB or 4MB in size, while using full 48MP ProRAW quality can result in files 10 to 12 times the size of a standard shot. With file sizes growing across the board, iPhone users might struggle to store all of their photos on-device. Relying on cloud storage to fill the gap can be a costly and slow alternative, but there's another solution.

iPhones can capture photos in either JPEG or HEIF formats, with the latter being the default option on newer models and recent iOS versions. However, you may have changed the default to JPEG for a variety of reasons, and this is a waste of valuable storage space. It's smarter to save iPhone pictures in HEIF for efficiency and quality reasons now, reserving the option to convert to JPEG later. While there are advantages to using JPEG to capture your iPhone photos, you're unlikely to need them for every shot.

JPEG is great for many things — efficiency isn't one

Images saved in JPEG are taking up valuable storage space

JPEG, which is named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group that coined it, is a versatility champion. The obvious reason is that it's compatible with a wide variety of cameras, devices, sites, and apps. If an image field in a form requires a certain photo file format, it's probably JPEG. The sneakier reason JPEG is excellent for versatility is that the codec is customizable. Users can specify the amount of quality and compression they want for each JPEG export, and this is ideal for parity between sharpness and size.

You can shrink down JPEG exports to be as tiny as your storage situation allows, although there's a cost associated with the compression. It's a lossy process that leaves behind quite a bit of color and picture quality details to permit the more compact file sizes of compressed JPEG images. Even at full size, the JPEG format is limited to 8-bit color, and this fails to meet the demands of modern iPhone hardware. The latest phone cameras support 10-bit color with over a billion colors captured for accuracy reasons, and JPEG can't live up to the task of storing them.

The 8-bit color limitation of JPEG means that the format can only store 256 color values per channel. When used on an iPhone, the choice to use JPEG results in photos that are less detailed, taking up more space on your phone than alternative file formats. It's the worst of both worlds, unless you need peak compatibility with Android and Windows devices. Android 10 and later should support HEIC/HEIF natively, but Microsoft requires you to download the HEIF Image Extension for full compatibility with Windows 11.

HEIF is better for space-saving without quality loss

It supports 10-bit color for improved HDR performance, too

The advantage of using the High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) on your iPhone is having smaller file sizes with more visual data than comparable JPEG photos. HEIF supports 10-bit color, enabling full support for 1,024 color values per channel. That equals out to four times the amount of color values per channel than JPEG stores.

If your photo editing software supports HEIF files, like Pixelmator Pro on macOS or Adobe Photoshop on macOS or Windows (with the HEIF extension), the most efficient format is actually preferable. Support for more color and visual data provides more flexibility for editors in post-production.

HEIF uses a better compression algorithm with JPEG that creates smaller files with more visual data on average. The exact amount of space saved by using HEIF instead of JPEG will depend on your iPhone model and camera settings. On my iPhone Air, Apple estimates a 24MP JPEG photo will be approximately 4.8MB in size, whereas a 24MP HEIF photo will be approximately 4MB in size. That's a small difference for just one photo, but over time, the space-saving qualities of HEIF can make a huge difference for large photo libraries.

You can switch between HEIF and JPEG on your iPhone by opening the Settings app, navigating to the Camera page, and tapping Formats. There, you will find a Camera Capture setting that can be toggled between High Efficiency and Most Compatible. The former saves photos in HEIF, while the latter saves photos in JPEG. Generally, most iPhone users should keep High Efficiency as the default, but professionals with workflows that require the best compatibility can change the setting to Most Compatible.

It's easy to convert images back to JPEG later

Don't let the possibility of needing JPEG tomorrow waste your storage today

I prefer using HEIF for photos on my iPhone Air due to the quality and efficiency benefits, even though my iPhone is the 512GB model with plenty of room for large photo and video collections. The reason is simple — Apple makes it extremely easy to convert HEIF files to JPEG in a pinch. The new Preview app on iOS 26 includes a Quick Actions tab that includes convenient photo-editing tools, including Rotate, Create PDF, Convert Image, and Remove Background. Simply open a photo in the Preview app, use Quick Actions to convert the HEIF photo to JPEG, and you can export it wherever you'd like.

With a built-in JPEG conversion tool, I don't see any reason not to use HEIF on modern iPhones. It's an efficient file format that maximizes quality in the compression process, supporting more colors than legacy codecs like JPEG.