Q: Sharing full resolution photos

I think I have an answer..... I'm no expert, but I am also frustrated that it looks like iCloud is not saving full resolution.

I noticed that if I go to iCloud photos on my PC, then drag-and-drop into a folder on my PC it is a lower quality.

However, if I double click on the photo, then copy-and-paste its a much higher resolution.  Granted, I can only copy one photo at a time.

What do you think?

It is utterly embarrassing that Apple's photo sharing solutions are always borked. The original Photo Streams had mysterious photo limits. Now iCloud Photo Sharing reduces resolution, and this is barely explained in Apple's documentation. Even though iCloud itself backs up full-resolution shots and will download optimized versions onto mobile devices, there is actually no practical way of sharing them at full resolution. (More precisely, I can't even share the full-resolution back-end copies. This has nothing to do with local storage constraints.)

How can the richest company in the history of the world be skimping on storage costs like this? Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Facebook, etc., aren't playing these games.

This is unbelievably bone-headed and frustrating. The only possible explanation is some kind of paternalistic arrogance on Apple's part. It simply makes no sense otherwise.

Coming to this question in 2016 after doing quick research that showed 2048 long edge downsampling. I think "Family Sharing" uses the same mechanism and also down-samples.

As was noted in above responses there's no Apple owned way to do full resolution image sharing and distribution.  Apple has support for Flickr (soon to die with Yahoo?), I think it can manage full resolution images if you pay but I don't know how Apple handles it.

Apple's iCloud Photo Sharing is cost-free, so it's perhaps not too surprising they limit resolution. It makes it much less useful though.

I have no hope for any future improvements.

léonie:

The file size limit for Mail drop is 5 MB,

Make that 5 GB.

The message, including its attachments, is larger than 5 GB. Try sending the contents of your message in multiple email messages or compressing your attachments to make them as small as possible.

Thanks for catching that typo, OT

i just noticed this too!!!!

i am really ****** of Apple sometimes, at least let us to choose to keep them full resolution or downscale right???

nowadays everyone has wifi at home, why cant we keep the original full resolution!!!!!!!

i thought photos inside iCloud Photo Sharing are full resolution until just now..

indeed what the fxxx is apple doing!!

Photos - like iPhoto and Aperture - does preserve your original.

I've no idea how you know the set up in everybody's homes.

Don't know if you ever resolved this, but I was looking into this myself and found your question, and Apple's answer on keeping the original resolution of photos here:

iCloud Photo Library - Apple Support

Note in the paragraph on saving space on your phone, it shows that you can set it to save it as the original, the issue however is, others you share it with will also have to have it set like that, otherwise when they see it on their phone it will make it "optimized" (i.e. 2048 on the long end)... hope that helps...

It is a bit of a confusion in this discussion. iCloud has different services. This discussion is about Shared albums, previously known as Shared Photo Streams. Photos in Shared albums will be limited to 2048 pixels on the long edge, unless they are panoramic.

iCloud Photo Library will store the originals at the full resolution, but is not meant for sharing photos.

And some photos in this discussion lost the full resolution by dragging them from the Photos Library browser to a folder. This will only save previews.