Why do the photos on my iPhone 7 seem to be losing quality?
The photo quality is my iPhone 7 is very low. I found out that this may be because I switched on “iCloud Photo Library” a few months earlier, and “Optimize IPhone Store” was selected. Does doing so move all PREVIOUS photos to cloud, and replace them with low-res photos?
The answer is in the Optimize iPhone Storage setting.
When enabled, only thumbnails of photos are stored in local storage. By viewing a photo, you are downloading a compressed version from iCloud. There is no quality loss, since the original photos are still accessible by loading them one by one or turning this optimization off.
I believe that iCloud Photo Library uses some kind of lossy compression.
Here's a fix that worked for me.
Keep in mind: Although the screenshots are in Danish, the instructions below are in English, and the placement of the marked settings are the same in both English and Danish running iOS 12.2.
-
Go to "Settings" in your iPhone. Scroll down until you find "Photos". Tap it (Marked with a red circle in the following picture)
-
Now, you should see the following screen. Tap on "Download and Keep Originals" (Marked with a red circle in the following picture)
-
Scroll down until you find a setting called "Keep Originals". Tap it. (Marked with a red circle in the following picture)
-
Go back to "Settings" by tapping on the arrow in the upper left corner. (Marked with a green circle in the following picture)
-
Now you should see the following screen. Right under the "Photos" setting, you'll find a setting called "Camera". Tap it. (Marked with a red circle in the following picture)
-
Now you should see the following screen. Tap on "Formats" (Marked with a red circle in the following picture)
-
Now you should see the following screen. Tap on "Most Compatible" (Marked with a red circle in picture 6)
This should fix the issue :-)