Instagram Supports Uploading ProRAW Photos Taken With iPhone 12 Pro

Instagram is today rolling out support for the new ProRAW photos that are able to be captured with the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

apple proraw format
Instagram developer Tim Johnsen shared the news on Twitter, where he also said that ProRAW photos in the DNG format are not able to be edited on Instagram. Further details aren't available, but it seems that Instagram is converting the ProRAW file into JPG that's shown on Instagram.

Support is limited, but those who take ProRAW photos and edit them outside of Instagram will be able to share the resulting image directly on the social network without having to create a separate JPG. ProRAW images are large in size, coming in at around 25MB, so Instagram is compressing them.

ProRAW is an ‌iPhone‌ 12 Pro and ‌iPhone 12 Pro Max‌ feature that was enabled with the iOS 14.3 update. It takes advantage of the computational photographer features that Apple adds into its ‌iPhone‌ while also giving users control over white balance, noise reduction, sharpening, and more.

As photographer Austin Mann highlighted earlier this week, ProRAW is ideal in situations where Apple's general algorithms may struggle, such as mixed indoor lighting, extreme low light, and super high dynamic range images.

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Top Rated Comments

btrach144 Avatar
62 months ago

Why would anyone want a 20+ meg RAW file posted to Instagram exactly?
If you read the article then you’d see that Instagram is likely converting the heavy ProRAW file into a lightweight JPEG.

Instagram is not known for high quality photos. They compress the heck out of anything you upload.

They’re dropping that 25MB file into probably a 500K jpeg and certainly not keeping the ProRAW file.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
CubeHacker Avatar
62 months ago
Now how about that iPad version that they’ve been working on for... 6 years?
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Blackstick Avatar
62 months ago
Why would anyone want a 20+ meg RAW file posted to Instagram exactly?
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
SVTmaniac Avatar
62 months ago
The whole purpose of RAW is so you can edit the photo the way you want and preserve maximum quality the save it as a jpeg so why would anyone upload a RAW directly without editing?
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
chabig Avatar
62 months ago

Why would anyone want a 20+ meg RAW file posted to Instagram exactly?
The more data you give Facebook, the more they can do with it!
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
kiensoy Avatar
62 months ago

Why would anyone want a 20+ meg RAW file posted to Instagram exactly?
Because maybe you shot the RAW for something else but now that you have it you might wanna upload it to Instagram as well.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)