How to Open JPEG XL Files on a Mac
On macOS Sonoma (14) or later, you just double-click it. Preview, Quick Look, Finder thumbnails and Safari all read .jxl. What macOS can't do is the reverse: no Apple app can save one. Here's what works on each version, how to convert a whole folder, and the problems people actually hit.
by Robert Castillo · Published
The short answer
If your Mac runs macOS Sonoma (14) or anything newer — Sequoia (15), Tahoe (26) or this autumn's macOS 27 — a .jxl behaves like any other photo. Double-click it and Preview opens it. Press the space bar in Finder and Quick Look shows it. Finder draws a thumbnail, and Safari displays it on web pages. Apple's own wording, shown next to the JPEG XL options in recent iPhone camera settings, is that JPEG XL files are supported on macOS 14 and later.
Support didn't arrive all at once, which is why you still find contradictory answers online. When Sonoma shipped in September 2023, Ars Technica's review found that Finder thumbnails and Quick Look worked but that Preview refused to open the files. Later Sonoma updates closed that gap, and by the time macOS 15 arrived users were reporting that Preview and Quick Look even rendered HDR JPEG XL images in HDR.
What has not changed in three years is the other direction. macOS reads JPEG XL, but it has no built-in way to write it: no Apple app saves or exports a .jxl. That one fact explains most of the confusion further down this page.
What opens a .jxl, version by version
| macOS | Preview, Quick Look, Finder | Safari | Save as .jxl |
|---|---|---|---|
| macOS 27, Tahoe 26, Sequoia 15 | Yes | Yes | No |
| Sonoma 14 | Yes (Preview only after the early updates) | Yes, Safari 17 | No |
| Ventura 13, Monterey 12 | No | Yes, with Safari 17 or later | No |
| Big Sur 11 and older | No | No | No |
Two browser changes landed in the past fortnight. Chrome 155, released on 6 October 2026, decodes JPEG XL by default, as Google announced the same day. Firefox 158, released on 13 October, says in its release notes that it now supports the format. Before that, both browsers downloaded a .jxl instead of showing it, so if yours still does, update it before you blame the file. Our browser test tells you in a second what your browser actually does, and the Firefox guide covers the details there.
Safari has one limit: its JPEG XL support covers still images only, without progressive loading, so animated .jxl files don't play in it. For photographs that never matters.
Can Preview save or export JPEG XL?
No — and neither can anything else Apple ships on the Mac. This is the question we get most from Mac users, so we checked it three separate ways rather than trust one forum post.
Preview's own manual
Apple's Preview guide for macOS 27 lists the export formats as HEIC, JPEG, JPEG-2000, OpenEXR, PDF, PNG and TIFF, with some older formats hidden behind Option-click. JPEG XL isn't among the named ones.
The system's image engine
sips, the command-line tool built on the same engine as Preview, read JPEG XL but couldn't write it in a test on macOS 27.0 published in September 2026. A separate developer check found JPEG XL missing from the list of formats macOS can save.
Finder's Convert Image
The Quick Action converts to JPEG, PNG or HEIF and nothing else. It's a fine way to get rid of a .jxl, but it can't create one.
The one place Apple does write JPEG XL is inside the iPhone camera: since iOS 18, the iPhone 16 Pro and later Pro models can store ProRAW photos with JPEG XL compression, but those arrive as .dng files, not .jxl. Our iPhone guide explains how to spot them.
To create .jxl files on a Mac you need something else: cjxl from Homebrew (below), or an editor such as GIMP, GraphicConverter, XnView MP or Acorn, all of which the format's community site lists as JPEG XL-capable. Photoshop, Lightroom and GIMP each have their own guide here: Photoshop, Lightroom, GIMP.
On an older Mac (Monterey or Ventura)
On Monterey or Ventura, nothing built into macOS opens a .jxl. Ars Technica put it bluntly in its 2023 review: on those versions basically no app other than Safari can touch the files. That means no Preview, no Quick Look and blank icons in Finder.
Browsers are the exception. Safari 17 or later shows JPEG XL on both systems. Firefox 158 does too, and it still runs on anything from macOS 10.15 Catalina up. Chrome 155 shows it as well, but current Chrome needs macOS 13 Ventura, so on Monterey it can't update that far.
Beyond the browser, from least to most effort: open it in our viewer, which decodes the file inside any modern browser and lets you save it as JPG or PNG; or install XnView MP, which reads JPEG XL and runs on macOS 12 or later. If your Mac can take Sonoma, updating is the real fix, because it brings Preview, Quick Look and thumbnails along with it.
One historical wrinkle explains some old bug reports. During the 2023 beta, Apple deliberately switched JPEG XL off in Safari on Ventura and Monterey while it chased a rendering glitch (WebKit bug 258655). If Safari on an older Mac shows a broken image where a .jxl should be, run our browser test to see whether that copy of Safari decodes the format at all.
Converting a whole folder on a Mac
Four ways, from no installation to full control. All of them run on your own machine; none needs an internet connection once installed.
1. Preview (built in)
Select the .jxl files in Finder and open them together in Preview. Click in the sidebar, press ⌘A, then choose File → Export Selected Images…. Click Options, pick JPEG or PNG under Format, set the quality and choose a destination folder. Apple documents the same sidebar trick for converting several images at once.
2. Finder Quick Action (built in)
Select the files, Control-click, choose Quick Actions → Convert Image (on macOS 27 it sits under More). Pick JPEG, PNG or HEIF and a size. It's the fastest route for a handful of photos, and it saves the copies next to the originals.
3. Terminal with sips (built in)
mkdir jpg && sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 90 *.jxl --out jpg turns every .jxl in the current folder into a JPEG at quality 90 inside a new jpg folder. sips reads JPEG XL from Sonoma onwards; it can't write it.
4. Homebrew's jpeg-xl (most control)
brew install jpeg-xl installs cjxl and djxl from libjxl 0.12.0, the current official release. Then for f in *.jxl; do djxl "$f" "${f%.jxl}.jpg" -q 90; done converts the folder. Without -q, djxl rebuilds the original JPEG bit for bit when the .jxl was made from one, and uses quality 95 otherwise.
Going the other way, cjxl photo.jpg photo.jxl repacks a JPEG losslessly by default, so the original can always be recovered. Every flag that matters is in our cjxl and djxl command-line guide.
Two practical notes on Homebrew. It has ready-made packages of jpeg-xl for Apple Silicon Macs on Sequoia, Tahoe and macOS 27; on other set-ups it may have to compile the tools, which takes a while. And avoid ImageMagick for this particular job: Homebrew builds it without JPEG XL support (the formula passes --without-jxl), so magick photo.jxl photo.jpg fails with a «no decode delegate» error. libvips (brew install vips) does include JPEG XL.
What we measured
To put real numbers on the Homebrew route we ran libjxl 0.12.0, the same version Homebrew installs, over ten public-domain (CC0) photos from Wikimedia Commons. All ten are 12-megapixel JPEGs straight out of iPhones, from the iPhone 11 to the 15 Pro. The test machine was a 6-core Linux server rather than a Mac, so treat the timings as a rough guide; file sizes on a Mac should land very close.
| Test | Result |
|---|---|
| JPEG → JXL, lossless repack (cjxl defaults) | 34.8 MB → 28.9 MB, 17.1% smaller (15.6–19.2% per photo) |
| That JXL → JPEG again (djxl) | 10 of 10 byte-identical to the original |
| Time for all 10 photos | cjxl 6–7.5 s, djxl 2–2.5 s |
| Lossy JXL from the pixels (-d 1) → JPEG quality 90 | 1.42× the size of the .jxl; SSIMULACRA2 median 86.2 |
| Lossy JXL from the pixels (-d 1) → JPEG quality 95 (djxl default) | 1.92× the size; SSIMULACRA2 median 88.8 |
| EXIF date, camera, GPS, orientation | Kept at every step, as was the Display P3 colour profile (with djxl, checked on one photo) |
SSIMULACRA2 is the perceptual metric the JPEG XL developers use. On its published scale, 85 means «excellent» (no difference an average viewer notices comparing in place at 1:1) and 90 means visually lossless. Quality 90 is therefore plenty for photos you're sending to someone, and djxl's default of 95 buys a little extra fidelity for roughly a third more file size.
The lossless repack is the result worth remembering if you archive on a Mac: about a sixth of the space back, with every original JPEG recoverable byte for byte. One warning goes with the metadata row: with djxl, location data travels into the converted copies, so strip it before you share them anywhere public. The converter on this site behaves differently, because it redraws the image in the browser: its JPGs carry no date, camera or GPS data at all.
Problems you'll probably run into
| What happens | Why, and the fix |
|---|---|
| Double-clicking opens the wrong app | Another app claimed the .jxl extension. Select the file, choose File → Get Info, pick Preview under «Open with» and click Change All. |
| Preview opens it but won't save your edits as .jxl | macOS has no JPEG XL writer. Use File → Export to save as JPEG, PNG or HEIC, and keep the original .jxl. |
| Blank icons, no Quick Look | You're on Ventura or older. Update to Sonoma or later, or use Safari, Firefox, our viewer or XnView MP. |
| magick says «no decode delegate» | Homebrew's ImageMagick is built without JPEG XL. Use djxl, sips or vips instead. |
| Chrome or Firefox downloads the file | An older version. Chrome 155 and Firefox 158, both released in October 2026, show JPEG XL by default. On Monterey, Chrome can't update to 155 (it needs macOS 13), so use Firefox or Safari. |
| An animated .jxl doesn't move in Safari | Safari's JPEG XL support covers still images only. |
Common questions
Which macOS version do I need to open .jxl files?
Can I make Preview save a picture as JPEG XL?
What's the free way to convert .jxl to JPG on a Mac?
sips command in Terminal. None needs anything installed on Sonoma or later.