What is the Photos desktop app doing to my pictures and videos when I export them without any changes, and how do I ensure the highest quality if I do make changes?

Question

What is the Photos desktop app doing to my pictures and videos when I export them without any changes, and how do I ensure the highest quality if I do make changes?

I really want to preserve my iPhone videos and photos at the highest quality but I feel like Apple is doing a few things to reduce that.

So my questions has two parts. The first is that when I'm exporting a video it's asking me to choose a quality. Why doesn't it just export at the native quality? Is Photos trying to re-encode my video, thereby reducing quality? Is it because of the metadata being a separate file?

Secondly, if I make adjustments to my pictures, what is the best way to preserve the image quality? the default is JPG but from what I understand PNG is lossless. Or are the photos so small it doesn't matter? Why wouldn't Apple try to always give me the closest thing to the original?

Thanks for reading!

Posted on Aug 21, 2019 2:43 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Old Toad

Level 10

215,310 points

Aug 21, 2019 4:21 PM in response to SilverLobster

You are not exporting the original file. You're exporting the "edited" version of it which gives you 4 different formats,; 480p, 720p, 1080p and 4k.

If you export the original you'll get this format:

If you export at the various formats you'll get these values:

If you look closely the original format is close to the 480p format. You would have to export a video at each of the formats and compare them to see which you think is better.

So it's not what is Apple doing to your videos, it's what you want from your videos.

Reply

What is the Photos desktop app doing to my pictures and videos when I export them without any changes, and how do I ensure the highest quality if I do make changes?

Similar questions