2020 is shaping up to be an eventful year, and we’ve been hard at work in 2020 on new features for Halide, Spectre, and beyond .

Today we’re breaking our silence with our latest update: here’s Halide 1.16, a ‘groundwork’ update with several features that improve everything about RAW — it improves how Halide displays your RAW captures, how it saves RAW (and regular compressed) files, improves Halide’s file output, and makes your life a bit better. On top of that, we’ve improved Halide’s performance even more.

Let’s start with a feature that merits its own description: Rescue.

Rescue

There’s no worse of feeling than going into your camera roll after a day of shooting, only to discover that perfect shot is disappeared. This is extremely rare, but not impossible:

You taking a photo at 5% battery, and suddenly the phone shuts down.

You get a phone call in the middle of a shoot

Or, a bug in iOS or (believe it or not) Halide causes an issue

Even it’s a one in a million chance, we cannot accept even the slightest chance of losing a photo. We treat data loss as a critical problem, and that’s why we built Rescue.

In the past, when you took a photo with Halide, we would simplify hand it off to iOS to upload to iCloud. We assumed everything worked as expected, so long as iOS doesn’t hand us back an error. In Halide 1.16 we trust but verify.

Now when you capture a photo, we keep a backup copy around, similar to how your email client might have an “outbox.” We don’t remove that backup copy until we’ve verified for ourselves that the photo exists in your library.

If you ever feel like, “I swore I took more photos,” and you can’t find it in your iCloud library, take a peak inside Image Rescue.

Open the photo reviewer. Tap the “Grid View” icon. Tap the “Lifesaver” icon in the upper right.

Rescue is a feature that we’ve put together thanks to feedback from our community, which includes photographers that have pushed iPhones to their limits in extremely remote locations or extreme conditions. We’re excited to release this update to show that Halide is the ultimate photography tool that everyone can truly rely on, even when the going gets tough.

Smart RAW is Smarter

We first introduced our Machine Learning based Smart RAW adjustment last year. We gather data continuously to improve camera settings for better RAW output with more editing headroom and lower noise.