iPhone 11 Please help. Photos synced back to phone from computer are compressed.

[The.Glorious.Son]

Hello. Only today did I realize 23,000 photos later, when I airdrop photos from my camera roll to my MacBook, they retain their original size. However, when I sync them back to my phone into a permanent album, the size is greatly reduced. They remain a jpeg it’s not that they are converting to another format. Any ideas why this happens? Here is an example. The original is 5.6MB at shows 12MP. The same stats are there when it’s on my MacBook. However when synced back to my phone, it says 1.3MB and 3MP.

 

[now i see it]

Is your MacBook converting them to HEIF before sending them back to the iPhone?

Zoom all the way in to pixel level magnification on both photos and see if you can see any degradation.

 

[The.Glorious.Son]

Is your MacBook converting them to HEIF before sending them back to the iPhone?

Zoom all the way in to pixel level magnification on both photos and see if you can see any degradation.

They both show JPG in the file info. I notice I can zoom in a fair amount further on the original photo in the camera roll, which is 5.6 MB, compared to the one synced back to my phone which was reduced to 1.3 MB. Not good.

 

[The.Glorious.Son]

I just looked on my MacBook. There is definitely a reduction in quality when the photo syncs back to my phone from the MacBook. Something is a happening during that process.

 

[ericwn]

Whenever you sync images from the computer via iTunes or Music/Finder Apple assumes you just want a shrunken version on the go.
This approach is a remnant of the iPod days I guess and hasn’t changed.

 

[The.Glorious.Son]

Whenever you sync images from the computer via iTunes or Music/Finder Apple assumes you just want a shrunken version on the go.
This approach is a remnant of the iPod days I guess and hasn’t changed.

Ugh, I had no idea this was happening. I’ve been doing this for years as I thought it was a convenient way to not only backup my pics on the computer, but I could categorize them into folders and they sync back nicely as albums. It also keeps my camera roll reasonable.

Another thread today about something different caused me to stumble upon this and now I’m almost sick. 23,000 photos all categorized, all exactly how I want them, and all at the size of 3 megapixels. This sucks lol.

 

[ericwn]

Ugh, I had no idea this was happening. I’ve been doing this for years as I thought it was a convenient way to not only backup my pics on the computer, but I could categorize them into folders and they sync back nicely as albums. It also keeps my camera roll reasonable.

Another thread today about something different caused me to stumble upon this and now I’m almost sick. 23,000 photos all categorized, all exactly how I want them, and all at the size of 3 megapixels. This sucks lol.

Sucks indeed. Now one solution out of this is to move to iCloud Photo Library and let all devices access them from there. Convenient and not terribly expensive but not for everyone.