Blurry images in gallery

Question

Level 1

4 points

Blurry images in gallery

I’ve just moved to an iPhone and downloaded pictures and photos from my previous phone via cloud (which was super hard but that’s a topic for another discussion).

What I noticed was that all pictures are blurry. At first I thought that something went wrong when downloading them from cloud, but then I pressed an “edit” button and blurry picture became sharp again in preview screen. If nothing is changed, then after going back picture becomes blurry again, but if I move any slider or crop a picture and save it, it stays sharp.

Is there a way to make pictures sharp again without manipulating every single one individually? I could’ve done it this way if I had like 10 of them, but there’s more than 4k pictures and they’re all blurry.

Example

iPhone XS Max, iOS 18

Posted on Mar 30, 2025 3:48 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Mar 31, 2025 8:13 AM in response to H0ppS

You don't say what "cloud" service you were using.

It sounds like you may have turned on iCloud Photos and Optimize Storage. Optimize Storage saves space on your phone by keeping only smaller, lower resolution pictures there, and relying on the full files being kept at iCloud Photos. This way you can quickly scroll through all your pictures, even though they don’t take up so much space. Then, when you need the full pictures for printing or editing, etc, the phone grabs the full file from iCloud. This is very cool, but it can lead to a slight delay, sometimes. With Optimize Storage, you can save over 80% of the storage that would be used by Photos otherwise.

You can turn Optimize Storage off at Settings>Apps>Photos by choosing Download Originals.

It may take a while for all your originals to download, and they may not download until you use Edit to force the download for individual pictures.

Reply

Answer 2

H0ppS Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 31, 2025 3:03 PM in response to Richard.Taylor

I’ve used Yandex Disk. It’s a popular cloud service where I’m from. iCloud didn’t work for me. For some reason it wouldn’t let me upload pictures because of pictures format but they all definitely were jpg.

I’ve turned off the synchronisation with iCloud before downloading the pictures, then turned it on and off a couple of times to see how it would effect the quality. The same thing I did with the storage optimisation but it had no effect.

Reply

Quick Links

Blurry images in gallery