Black and White picture download as color (Dropbox)

[jmorabito1976]

I took a number of pictures this weekend. They are showing up on my phone (iPhone 5s 7.1) in black and white, and when I sync them to Dropbox they are showing Black and White in Dropbox, but when I download them from Dropbox they are in color? Am I missing something here?

Thanks,

Justin

 

[maflynn]

What app are you using to change it over to B&W.

Did you try emailing yourself the picture and see how it comes out?

 

[jmorabito1976]

Thank you for the reply. I am actually just changing the settings before I take photos right in the iOS camera app by clicking the 3 gray-scale circles in the bottom right of the camera app, next to the shutter button.

If I email the picture to myself and view it in Gmail on my Windows machine, the thumbnail in the email is B&W but when I download the picture and open it in Windows Photo Viewer it is color. If I download the picture and drag it onto my desktop, the thumbnail is now in color. If I transfer the photos from my iPhone to my Dropbox account using the sync in the Dropbox app, they show up in color. It is like the camera is taking them in color but displaying them in B&W.

If I look at the same email that I sent myself above on the iPhone mail app, the picture is still in B&W. If I save it from the email to my photos on the iPhone it stays in B&W too. It appears that when the photo leaves the apple domain it reverts to color.

 

[csixty4]

It is like the camera is taking them in color but displaying them in B&W.

That's exactly what's happening. Apple makes extensive use of the EXIF metadata encoded in .jpg images to describe the transformations applied to the image instead of replacing the original color image completely. That way, the original data is still there if you ever want to revert back to it.

Some programs ignore this data or only support a limited number of features. Browsers tend to have the best support, but Windows Photo Viewer probably isn't advanced enough to pick up on all those tweaks.

 

[jmorabito1976]

OK. That makes sense. Is there an app or something that would "flatten" the images in B&W before I export?

I haven't tried on my MacMini either as I don't usually sync my phone to it, but what program is the easiest on Mac to pull photos off of the phone, and that might maintain the B&W?

Thanks,

Justin

 

[hydrostarr]

How to fix?

So... how does one fix this?

*All* of my black-and-white-capture photos uploaded (via Dropbox Camera Uploads) to my Mac OS 10.9.5 MacBook Air all appear in color in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Preview.app.

All of said pictures look like B&W on my phone and via all of the above viewers reading any email attachment sent from my phone.

This wasn't the case when I've used previous iPhone + Dropbox_Camera_Upload configurations. I'm not sure what changed to "break" this -- it's rather frustrating.