What it costs you in storage
A 12 MP ProRAW file is around 25 MB. At 48 MP it is closer to 75 MB — one frame outweighing thirty ordinary photos. A single afternoon of shooting ProRAW can cost more than a year of casual HEIC snapshots, which is why it is one of the few cases where deleting a small number of files makes a visible difference to your free space.
ProRAW is also on Pro models only, and it does not stay on by itself: unless you keep it in Settings › Camera › Preserve Settings, the camera returns to HEIC the next time you open it. That is worth knowing in both directions — people who meant to shoot raw find they didn’t, and people who forgot they turned it on find a folder of 25 MB files.
What you can do about it in iOS
- Turn it on or off: Settings › Camera › Formats, in the ProRAW section on Pro models. With it enabled, a RAW badge in the Camera app switches it per shot.
- Find what you already shot: a ProRAW file carries a RAW badge in the corner when you open it in Photos, and Settings › General › iPhone Storage › Photos shows what the library costs in total.
- Keep the edit, drop the weight: if you have already exported the version you want, the original DNG is often the largest thing in your library that nobody will ever open again.
Keep it, or don’t shoot it
ProRAW is worth its size when you actually edit — recovering a blown sky or grading a portrait is genuinely a different job with a DNG. It is worth nothing at all on a snapshot you will post as-is. The decision is best made before the shutter, not in a storage panic afterwards.
Kept works through your library on the phone itself, so even your largest originals are never uploaded anywhere to be looked at.