iPhone not saving full resolution images to iCloud

[TorontoMike]

My wife and I both purchased iPhone XRs around the time our 3-year old was born so that we would have many family photos to look back upon.

Every month, we would download the photos from iCloud to our local NAS drive to backup the data. We would then delete the photos from iCloud.

Today, more than 3 years after starting this process, we discovered that iCloud was only providing us will small-sized images, typically 1536 x 2048 (3.1MP) images of around 500kb. This is far smaller than the 12MP images that the iPhone XR is capable of taking.

We were crushed. We hadn't looked at the file information or printed many photos so we did not know that the photos we were saving were of such low resolution. I don't think many of them are going to be printable at more than 4' x 6'.

We called Apple and spoke with 3 levels of customer support. They remotely watched how we were downloading and saving our photos and confirmed that we were following the right processes for taking, storing, and transferring photos. They said that they did not know where the problem was happening. While they were very polite, they did confirm that there was nothing they could do on their end to restore all our missing photos. They said that they'll be looking into the issue and calling us back within a week to provide an update on what they learn.

According to the iPhone's settings, selecting the 'Optimize iPhone Storage' option is supposed to save a smaller, low-resolution image on the phone while making the full resolution image available on iCloud. In our case, this still doesn't seem to be happening. The low-resolution image (maybe intended for local iPhone viewing?) seems to be the only one making it to iCloud.

The same problem has happened with my iPhone / iCloud account and my wife's so I'm open to the idea that we are both doing something wrong.

Can anyone explain what may be happening?

Mike

 

[ian87w]

How are you downloading the photos from iCloud to your NAS? And are the photos backed up to iCloud straight from the camera, or has it been sent around that might have reduced its resolution? Also, does it happen to all photos or just some? As a precaution, also make sure to select "Kepp Originals" in the Settings of Photos instead of Automatic.

 

[TorontoMike]

How are you downloading the photos from iCloud to your NAS? And are the photos backed up to iCloud straight from the camera, or has it been sent around that might have reduced its resolution? Also, does it happen to all photos or just some? As a precaution, also make sure to select "Kepp Originals" in the Settings of Photos instead of Automatic.

Thanks for your reply. We've been downloading the images straight from iCloud's website to our local NAS drive so there hasn't been any opening and re-saving of the file that could cause re-compression. When you look at the photo file info on iCloud, they are small file sizes (around 500kb) so the full resolution image doesn't seem to be making it from our iPhone to iCloud.

You're right, from now on, we absolutely will check the 'Download and Keep Originals' option checked. At the same time, the 'Optimize iPhone Storage' option is supposed to save the full resolution image to iCloud and doesn't seem to be working for us as advertised.

So frustrating and disappointing.

Best,
Mike

 

[ian87w]

Thanks for your reply. We've been downloading the images straight from iCloud's website to our local NAS drive so there hasn't been any opening and re-saving of the file that could cause re-compression. When you look at the photo file info on iCloud, they are small file sizes (around 500kb) so the full resolution image doesn't seem to be making it from our iPhone to iCloud.

You're right, from now on, we absolutely will check the 'Download and Keep Originals' option checked. At the same time, the 'Optimize iPhone Storage' option is supposed to save the full resolution image to iCloud and doesn't seem to be working for us as advertised.

So frustrating and disappointing.

Best,
Mike

I think I figured it out. It's not the fault of anyone. And if you haven't done anything else, your full res photos might still be safe in iCloud.

I don't really use iCloud Photos so I had to simulate this with my Windows PC. Basically when you want to download your photos from iCloud.com, don't just click the download button. Hover your mouse over download icon and you will see a drop down arrow. Click that and make sure you select full original quality. If not, iCloud will only send the resized version. I tried it and yes, if I just clicked on the download button, iCloud downloads the resized version. But if I hover and choose download original, the original photo is downloaded.

Give it a try.

 

[TorontoMike]

I think I figured it out. It's not the fault of anyone. And if you haven't done anything else, your full res photos might still be safe in iCloud.

I don't really use iCloud Photos so I had to simulate this with my Windows PC. Basically when you want to download your photos from iCloud.com, don't just click the download button. Hover your mouse over download icon and you will see a drop down arrow. Click that and make sure you select full original quality. If not, iCloud will only send the resized version. I tried it and yes, if I just clicked on the download button, iCloud downloads the resized version. But if I hover and choose download original, the original photo is downloaded.

Give it a try.

Thank you so much for the advice and even more for your efforts!

Previously, we clicked the download button on iCloud. Instead of getting a full resolution photo, we were getting a low rez version. For a specific file we are looking at, we got 700kb.

We tried using your method of hovering on the download icon. That gives us 2 options. One says 'most compatible' the other says 'unmodified originals'. Selecting the second option, we get an HEIC file size of 1.7MB. That seems much better (and we are super grateful). Strangely, when we download the file directly from the iPhone, we get JPEGs of 6MB or so. Do you think the HEIC file is just that much more efficient at encoding the image?

We also only have our last month or two of photos on iCloud. To save space, we've been deleting the photos from iCloud once we thought we were downloading them to our NAS drive. That means we've lost about 3 years of photos.

Again, many, many thanks for your advice and effort! If you have solved the mystery, it seems like incredibly bad UI that Apple has adopted if clicking the download icon on iCloud only gives you a low rez version of your image. It's not entirely intuitive / obvious that you have to hover over the download icon to dowload a full rez version.

If you're ever in Toronto, please let us know and we'd be thrilled to show you around and buy you dinner!

Best regards,
Mike

 

[ian87w]

Thank you so much for the advice and even more for your efforts!

Previously, we clicked the download button on iCloud. Instead of getting a full resolution photo, we were getting a low rez version. For a specific file we are looking at, we got 700kb.

We tried using your method of hovering on the download icon. That gives us 2 options. One says 'most compatible' the other says 'unmodified originals'. Selecting the second option, we get an HEIC file size of 1.7MB. That seems much better (and we are super grateful). Strangely, when we download the file directly from the iPhone, we get JPEGs of 6MB or so. Do you think the HEIC file is just that much more efficient at encoding the image?

We also only have our last month or two of photos on iCloud. To save space, we've been deleting the photos from iCloud once we thought we were downloading them to our NAS drive. That means we've lost about 3 years of photos.

Again, many, many thanks for your advice and effort! If you have solved the mystery, it seems like incredibly bad UI that Apple has adopted if clicking the download icon on iCloud only gives you a low rez version of your image. It's not entirely intuitive / obvious that you have to hover over the download icon to dowload a full rez version.

If you're ever in Toronto, please let us know and we'd be thrilled to show you around and buy you dinner!

Best regards,
Mike

Ouch, sorry to hear that you have deleted your old photos.

Yeah, poor UI. I mean why do they even have such option for the download button? Anybody would expect to download the original if you click a download button...

As for HEIC, yes, they are more efficient. The HEIC photos from my iPhone 7+ are only around 1 to 2MB in size. Meanwhile, JPEG at same resolution can reach around 4 to 6MB.

Glad to help.

 

[TorontoMike]

I think I figured out what is happening, and it's not pretty.

As many of you know, Apple switched from using JPEG to a new image format, HEIF. When my wife and I transferred the images from our iCloud accounts to our Windows computer by clicking the 'Download' button, I believe OS is selecting to maximize compatibility and choosing to export a JPEG instead of the HEIF format. The problem is that the JPEG size it seems to be selecting is a pitifully small 'high efficiency' 1136 x 2048 file size.

If instead you long press / hover on the download button (as Ian87W suggested), you have the option to download either a high efficiency image (the low rez JPEG) or the original image (the high rez HEIF file). Selecting the HEIF file seems to be the only way to get the full image.

My guess is that Apple does not seem to be handling the automatic conversion between HEIF and JPEG well and is confounding image format and file size when these are related but different things. The fact that the default setting (clicking on the download button) for us results in the transfer of a low rez image without any notice or warning sounds like astoundingly bad user interface design. I wonder how many other Apple users have been affected. Unless they go and inspect the file size or try to print a photo, they may never know.

We spent about 2 hours last night with 3 different Apple customer service / technical advisers. We shared our computer and they watched us go through the file transfer process and didn't understand what was happening. I think it's therefore fair to say that Apple isn't making any of this clear enough.

Mike