Apple made a change that could save 50% of your iPhone's camera storage

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What if you could save half of your iPhone's camera storage without doing anything differently?

That's what Apple is promising with iOS 11, the next major software update for iPhone and iPad coming this fall.

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Thanks to a technical change, Apple is promising that photos and videos you shoot will require 50% of the storage they do now. That's because Apple is switching from the h.264 video compression and JPEG photo formats to HEVC and HEIF.

We were first alerted to the change by 9to5Mac, which tested iOS 11's developer beta and found that the new formats cut the file size of photos nearly in half while maintaining image quality.

That's good news for iPhone and iPad owners who are concerned with saving storage. It also paves the way for Apple to bring higher-quality 4K video, which uses HEVC as well, to the Apple TV.

The only catch is that these new photo and video formats will only work on Apple devices running the A9 processor or newer. That means you won't get this storage-saving change if your device is older than the iPhone 6s or 2017 iPad.

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