Wesley Hilliard
The Instagram app for iPhone will receive an update with ProRAW support sometime Friday, but only for uploading photos, not editing or capturing.
Apple ProRAW was released to the public with iOS 14.3 and apps are slowly updating to enable its use. Developers can use the ProRAW API to add support to a camera app or photo editor for the new format.
ProRAW is not a format itself, but a package containing a DNG, or Digital Negative, file with additional information. Apple has developed ProRAW on top of an open standard to serve a RAW image format coupled with computational data from Apple's image signal processor.
This means users get the best of both worlds when taking ProRAW photos, and now Instagram will take advantage of it. A tweet from an iOS Instagram developer revealed the update was due sometime Friday.
Instagram should able to handle sharing ProRAW photos as of this morning, may take a bit to propagate out.
— Tim Johnsen (@timonus) December 18, 2020
First spotted by iMore, the report also notes that the editing tools within Instagram will not be able to take advantage of ProRAW and its data, so it is unclear just how Instagram will support the addition. It appears that the change will only affect the uploading tool and server side adjustments to allow the images to display properly.
Instagram could add ProRAW support to its built-in camera and its editor application, but it won't be doing so yet. This basic update will ensure any photo you upload from your iPhone 12 Pro will display correctly on Instagram, so it is advised you edit the photo outside of Instagram before posting.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
Andrew O'Hara
William Gallagher
2 Comments
I fail to see what use there might be of uploading (Unedited) ProRAW files to Instagram other than giving Facebook access to them - Not something I'd want to encourage!