Modern phones and cameras capture a much richer range of colour than the web traditionally displays. Take an iPhone photo of a sunset and you'll find the original on your phone shows deeper oranges and reds than the version that appears in most photo galleries. That's because for years the web has standardised on sRGB — a colour space defined back in 1996 — and most galleries quietly convert everything down to it, discarding the extra colour your camera worked hard to capture.
We've now updated our photo processing to preserve that wider colour range. When you upload a photo shot in Display P3, Adobe RGB, or ProPhoto, our system detects the source colour space, converts it to Display P3 for output, and embeds the appropriate profile so modern browsers know how to display it correctly. On a P3-capable screen — every recent iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and an increasing number of Android phones and external monitors — your photos will look noticeably more vivid, especially in saturated reds, greens, and skies. On older sRGB screens, browsers transparently fall back to standard rendering, so nothing looks wrong; it just looks the same as before.
A nice side benefit of the approach we took: photos that were already in sRGB (which is most of them) get exactly the same output as before, byte-for-byte. We only pay the small cost of an embedded colour profile — about half a kilobyte — for photos that actually benefit from it. That keeps thumbnails and gallery pages just as fast as they were, while finally letting your wide-gamut photos shine on the displays that can show them.