iPhonetography: 4x3 vs. 16x9 Aspect Ratios

My old iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 12.5 has a camera sensor that takes pictures in a 4x3 aspect ratio (3,264 x 2,448 pixels, which is approximately 8 megapixels). My new iPhone 12 Pro Max running iOS 14.3 provides an option to take pictures in either a 4x3 or 16x9 aspect ratio, as shown in the following settings:

I decided to take photos in both aspect ratios and inspect the Exif data. I found that the 4x3 aspect ratio yielded a 4,032 x 3,024 image file which is approximately 12 megapixels. The 16x9 aspect ratio yielded a 4,032 x 2,268 image file which is approximately 9 megapixels. So this tells me that the iPhone 12 Pro Max sensor is still natively in 4x3 aspect ratio like its predecessors, and when shooting in 16x9 mode, the phone is cropping pixels off of the top and bottom of the image.

Image Credit: de With, Sebastiaan. The iPhone 12 Pro Max: Real Pro Photography. PetaPixel.

If you’re like me and prefer to retain as much of the original information as possible so that you can edit your photos later, I’d recommend shooting in 4x3 mode, as this option preserves the most information. If you later want to crop your photos to 16x9 or another aspect ratio, you can decide exactly how much to crop and where. On the other hand, if you have no intention of editing your photos later, I think it great that you now have the option to toggle between 4x3 and 16x9 aspect ratios depending on the effect you are trying to generate. Remember that you can go to Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings > Creative Controls to tell your camera whether or not you want it to remember the last aspect ratio you used. If you do not preserve creative controls, your camera will default to 4x3 aspect ratio upon each launch.

Advanced tip: Note that there is a caveat to what I mentioned about about shooting in 4x3 aspect ratio to preserve the most information. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that even if you shoot in 16x9 aspect ratio, your iPhone saves the entire 4x3 version of the file along with a .aae sidecar which is an XML file that contains data about the adjustments you’ve made to the photo. The cropping to 16x9 is one such adjustment. So if you want to retrieve the original 4x3 photo, you can simply import your photo into your Photos app on your Mac. You can also export the unmodified original (whether it be .heic or .jpg) from Photos so that you can perform editing in Photoshop or another app. But if you’re going to do all this, then I’d suggest simply shooting in 4x3 aspect ratio to begin with.

According to this article, the 16x9 aspect ratio option was introduced in iOS 13 and is available for iPhone 11 and higher. Happy shooting!