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Tanax

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 15, 2011
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Stockholm, Sweden
It says that photos and videos taken on iOS 11 will be up to 40% smaller in space, freeing up space on your device. Will the photos already in iCloud Photos Library also be encoded in this more storage-saving technique?

That would be really nice, I'd reduce my iCloud storage needs a bit!
 
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It says that photos and videos taken on iOS 11 will be up to 40% smaller in space, freeing up space on your device. Will the photos already in iCloud Photos Library also be encoded in this more storage-saving technique?

That would be really nice, I'd reduce my iCloud storage needs a bit!

Unlikely. It's formated when the photo is taken, I don't think it can/applies to previous photos.
 
It says that photos and videos taken on iOS 11 will be up to 40% smaller in space, freeing up space on your device. Will the photos already in iCloud Photos Library also be encoded in this more storage-saving technique?

That would be really nice, I'd reduce my iCloud storage needs a bit!
I hope not or at least make it optional. It's gonna be a lossy to lossy conversion so there's going to be additional generation loss.
 
Unlikely. It's formated when the photo is taken, I don't think it can/applies to previous photos.
Maybe he means for pics/vids taken from now on?
And by the way I think future iterations of iPhoto will eventually allow for whole-library re-encoding and re-upload..

Anyway, if Apple stored HEIF/HEVC in iCloud right now, they would need to transcode them every time they serve them to older devices or devices not on iOS11/HighSierra...sounds weird...or maybe they actually store both versions and the space occupied by HEIF/HEVC is on them?

It could make more sense (again, for the time being, 2 years from now it will be different) to transcode from HEIF/HEVC to JPEG/h.264 before uploading to iCloud Photo Library from iPhone7, like when you share to Mail or social networks..
 
Unlikely. It's formated when the photo is taken, I don't think it can/applies to previous photos.

Then what happens when you open that photo on your iOS 11 device and it downloads the full photo? Will it be stored as H.265 and thus, re-uploaded to iCloud as that? Or will those photos still has to be H.264 decoded? Very confusing.

I hope not or at least make it optional. It's gonna be a lossy to lossy conversion so there's going to be additional generation loss.

As I understood it, it is not lossy, that's the whole advantage of using it?
 
Then what happens when you open that photo on your iOS 11 device and it downloads the full photo? Will it be stored as H.265 and thus, re-uploaded to iCloud as that? Or will those photos still has to be H.264 decoded? Very confusing.



As I understood it, it is not lossy, that's the whole advantage of using it?
Photos you took in the past will remain in the previous format they were taken in. Unless you go through an effort to change them. Photos you take going forward will use your settings preferences. Your old photos in iCloud will continue as they have and will not change. The savings is in the future.
 
As I understood it, it is not lossy, that's the whole advantage of using it?
Definitely lossy, just more efficient. You can't get super small sizes for high resolution images and videos with lossless compression.

Just to give you an idea, 1080p (8-bit) video at 24p would clock in at 398Mbps or use 500GB of space for a 1-hour video uncompressed. Meanwhile, a typical dual-layer Blu-ray disc only holds ~50GB.
 
Then what happens when you open that photo on your iOS 11 device and it downloads the full photo? Will it be stored as H.265 and thus, re-uploaded to iCloud as that? Or will those photos still has to be H.264 decoded? Very confusing.


Not really confusing. Any photo you have already taken stays in that format. Any photo you take from iOS 11 on, is the new format. Backwards compatible. Photos are in JPG format.
 
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