Portrait type photos are corrupted (grey area appear) when transferring from iPhone to PC

I am having the same issue with HEIC photos with filter or retouching but I realized that the original was still there and ultimately that was all that matters. With the few photos that were corruptes I use Drive to download the originals and work perfectly. Thank god there where few photos corrupted.

@lesterw, that fixes this problem, but introduces another. If you have "Keep originals" then transferring more than just a couple of photos causes the iPhone to disconnect from Windows. So it is not usable if you have many photos to transfer.

Also, as shown in the small print, "Most Compatible" on the camera side will limit other features, such as cinematic video.

This might be a workaround, but it is barely feasible. Thanks for trying anyway :-)

Sorry, I said the wrong thing in my previous comment. I meant to say it is “Automatic “ that causes iPhone to frequently disconnect when transferring data and requires a Windows reboot to get it to connect again. That feature just doesn’t work for more than just a few photos and I’ve tried it on multiple Windows machines. Consequently “Keep originals” is what must be used but that is what causes it to transfer as HEIC with a grey bar.

”Most compatible” on its own (without “automatic “ ) also fixes the issue but isn’t suitable for HDR, cinematic video etc, so likewise isn’t a viable solution.

@AussieLyndal I’m not at my computer right now, but I believe something you are doing is different from what I intended to provide as the solution. I can assure you the photos were full resolution and had the meta data to boot. I don’t believe I remember a “Downloads” folder in my process. Did you download the photos by accessing iCloud through your web browser (which does halve the quality)? Or did you download the iCloud for Windows app and copy them directly from the new iCloud folder? Happy to help you try to figure it out!

(For the record, the earlier post from you and @davidg82 about having to download extensions, I did not have to do that to open files. In my “testing” once the grey bar file is on the computer, if you send it back to your iPhone it remains corrupted and opens on the iPhone with the grey bar. To me, that meant that the file is truly ruined at that point.)

I think, this issue may have been solved now..?

1. I typically use my iPhone 12 camera 'zoomed', so that images fill the 16x9 frame
2. When synced two images appear on my PC - one 'natural / native' and one 'zoomed in'
3. The zoomed images are ALWAYS the ones distorted with the grey crop, as show in this pic of both
4. Yesterday I downloaded 6 MONTHS worth of images from my iPhone, each with a 'natural' aspect radio file and a 'zoom to 16x9' one.
5. EVERY 'zoom' image had the grey corruption above UP TO 4th January 2022. After that date, the same zoom ones do not have the corruption.

So - it appears to that me this "images corrupted by grey blocks" fault HAS BEEN FIXED, unless anyone knows otherwise? I regularly update IOS software

As is obvious above, I suspect it ONLY applies to image taken in '16x9' mode, which isn't a real zoom at all - it just crops the top and bottom.

Hi Peter,

I'm having a hard time with the same!

I've been calling Apple Support during the last two weeks, let's no talk about the miss commitment from their supervisors/managers promising callbacks they never complete; but after escalating this to their "engineering support" the solution was "change to the most compatible option so you'll have no issues while exporting your photos".

This is the most ridiculous answer I ever got from any kind of customer care/tech support, HEIF and HEVC libraries on my Windows PC are up and running, only HEIC files coming out from portrait mode regardless from wide/telephoto lenses are going wrong. For some reason every single HEIC file containing the final and processed image is coming up with the gray area at the bottom.

Attach you'll see an example of the same photo using the photo viewer from Windows 10 Pro Build 20H2 updated as of today Nov 24th 2020, and a third party app (Adobe Photoshop) throwing up the same result.

I've made a whole test using the wide and telephoto lenses on my iPhone 11 Pro Max. I sent this album to a manager and the "engineering support" so they can review it.

I'm expecting a callback by thursday Nov 26th at 8:00 PM CST, I'll update this topic in case more people are going through this BS.

For research purposes, feel free to download and review the photos by yourself. Definetly something going wrong here: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AlIXGCmwqXuPgiREZhks2_NYTjD5?e=tBrPjT

Best regards,

Walter

Hi Tony,

thanks for sharing your experience with this issue. However, I’m afraid that is incorrect, HEIC/HEVC format has been introduced since 2017/iOS 11. We were able since then to choose the format of our convenience by going to Settings > Photos > Automatic/Keep Originals.

Indeed, we can “solve” the problem by switching from “keep originals” to “automatic” as iOS devices will always convert to JPEG files while transferring outside, BUT then; what’s the point of introduce a new “enhanced and advance” format which gives you the benefit of P12 wide gamut, Deep Fusion, and high compress technology without sacrifice quality? It does not make any sense to us, the people facing this error since iOS 13.xx

Im following up since my first response on this topic long time ago, and believe me, it’s been a headache, most when you paid more than $1.5k for getting gray areas on your pictures.

Best regards,

Walter

Thanks for the answer.

That's exactly what I thought.

My guess is, that either Windows or iOS have problems unpacking / packing multiple-image-HEIC files.

HEIC files also include the original image and in my experiencie only those have problems while beeing displayed in Windows, not the single-image-HEICs.

Can anyone confirm this behaviour?

Wait, maybe I was wrong, how do to extract multiple images from one HEIC?

Because the size is almost the same, I think they both have the original.

The correct HEIC is 813,922 bytes and identified as a HEIC by imagemagick

"HEIC 1836x2417 1836x2417+0+0 8-bit sRGB 0.016u 0:00.001"

The corrupted HEIC is 814,434 bytes and identified as JPEG by imagemagick

"JPEG 1836x2417 1836x2417+0+0 8-bit sRGB 814434B 0.000u 0:00.000"

But then opening it, I get "premature end of JPEG file"

I have "keep originals" checked in the iPhone settings.

The binary info is very different between the two:

That is very interesting as I experienced the same problem. When I was opening the HEIC-Files in IrfanView, this program would notify me, that the file was actually an JPEG.

This means, that probably iOS is not capable to export multiple image HEIC file to Windows and the image is a mixture of JPEG-encoding and HEIC filename. Very disturbing.

Dear Apple team, would you please finally start working on this!!!!

Hello everyone,

And yet we're still here... and yet TheLittles keep trying to "advise" us to leave feedback...

And yet many of you have even shared binary, raw and metadata; we're certainly tech savvy users, aren't we?

And yet the I have this question too button keeps rising up (212 as of May 13th 2021)...

And yet after 7 months, 4 iOS golden master updates, and so many, many beta sprints were released; we still stuck here...

As I said on my conclusion post: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251982667?answerId=254921715022#254921715022

I lost my faith long time ago.

I'm glad this thread is being helpful to let so many people know this is a well self-user-known issue, but please do not except this is going to get fix soon, we well probably need to stick on JPEG, 8bit w/ no DeepFusion/ProRAW, etc.

Do not hesitate to keep updating this thread in case you have have something to share, eventually, you're going to get tired and will probably resigned thereafter (like me).

Take good care everyone,

Walter

Hi, sorry for the late reply. I'm sure that 1) it is an iPhone11Pro, 2) that I have this photo from July 2020 (I distinctively remember the place, the event, and of course the date), and 3) I always import in HEIC format.

I will however double check with my photo archives and come back to this. My theory is that in mid 2020 I was using iOS13 and this "feature" /s did not exist back then.

What I can assure all, is even with the iOS14.6 and the most recent HEVC Video Extensions 1.01.41483.0 from Microsoft, the gray area error remains. #greyareaheicgate

It depends how many files you download in one time and what system ( I think for mac it will work, not for Windows ). When I have downloaded and tried one photo, yes it works fine. But when you do it with like 50GBs it crashes ( it looks like iPhone disconnects )

Windows 10 latest update, transfer portrait mode HEIC photos to the desktop via cable. Direct cable to hard drive. SAME issue. Bottom 1/4 of the photo is missing and has a blip in the photo scan about a third of the way across a scan line before the photo disappears. JPG photo of the same scene is perfect. It's something in the photo processing software that Apple hasn't fixed yet or given the time, has no inclination to fix.

If I had to guess, the HEIC photo processing into the portrait mode is running out of memory or space before it completes every photo, so it just stops the processing. With every portrait photo, with a camera with plenty of HD space on the phone.

It's a BUG apple. . . the photos aren't processing into portrait mode with HEIC format.

I have to take portraits composed with the bottom 1/4 not in frame. VERY frustrating. Apple has a product that doesn't work as advertised, and there is no fix for the corrupted image that is created in portrait mode. And even worse, no word from the company that they are aware of the issue, willing to fix it or even acknowledge where the problem exists. Its software/hardware on Apple's end.