How to turn off iTunes photo "optimization"???

Photos you take on your iPhone maintain their original resolution. If you transfer them to iPhoto or another program, remove them from your camera roll, and then resynch back to the phone, the images will be optimized for viewing on the iPhone. However, the ORIGINAL, high-resolution image will still be found in your photo program on your computer. The iPhone was not made to store high-resolution images (it has only 32 MB storage after all), and this feature CANNOT be turned off.

The only way to keep your original high-resolution photos taken by the iPhone is to leave them in your camera roll.

The iPhone never was intended as a photo storage device. There are hard drives and thumb drives for that. You aren't losing your original quality photos, they are on your computer in iPhoto, Aperture, etc.

Personally, I prefer the ability of the iPhone to be able to show my hundreds of photos (to which I have the original high-res originals at home in iPhoto) on the go, which is the intent of the iPhone, rather than to just show the thumbnail of a few high-res photos I may have taken with my iPhone or elsewhere. This is how the iPhone was designed.

You have 3 things you can do:

1) feedback to http://www.apple.com/feedback/iPhone.html
2) research the features of electronic devices prior to future purchases
3) get a different phone that better meets your needs.

Well, the iPhone just doesn't do what you want it to do. Feedback to Apple via the link I provided is all you can do right now.

Message was edited by: gdgmacguy

Hey Louis,

Ignore gdmacguy, he doesn't seem to be understanding your question precisely.

It appears the iOS 4 update radically increased the resolution reduction that is used to "optimize" images from your desktop to your iphone.

Prior to the iOS 4 update today all my images, including those that were synced form my PC, were "optimized" on my iphone but were still sharp and crisp as they should be.

After the update, every single image that was synced was "re-optimized" and they are all now a very noticeable lower resolution where you can see the graininess even while zoomed out.

I am now doing another sync at the moment, and it appears, iTunes is re-optimizing again, lol.

I will update later tonight to let you know if the re-optimization helped.

Saul

Agree with Saul, gdmacguy seems to responding with a "caned" answer about the iPhone not being a storage device. Why is it I can take hundreds of photos in high quality on a 4g SD card but can't put a fraction of thos on my iPhone.

Anyway, I am experiencing the same thing as Saul about quality since updating to iOS 4. The first round gave me poor quality transfers and after I checked to sync Faces in iTunes the re-synced, my photos seem to be sharper when I zoom in. Side note here, I only checked off two people to show in Faces and it gave me everyone....

Waxie

Same issue here, Saul...not happy with the results. Hope the re-reoptimization improves the pics...

I too have an issue with this (FYI, I don't have OS4 yet). One thing I've found that works is to email yourself the hi-res photo, download it in the mail app, then save to the photo roll. This method is OK for a photo here and there. For 400+ photos (1GB worth) this would be a major PITA. I can't say the quality is one-to-one with the original, but it is noticeably better than the "optimized" version.

One thing you might also try is to find an app that will allow you to wirelessly transfer files to and from your phone. Some of those can copy image files from the app's local cache over to the photo roll. Do your research before you put down any money on those though..

Good luck.

I think this is an iOS4 issue. I just did my update and immediately went to put a nice high resolution pic as my background, and it looks like a screenshot from King's Quest IV.

I sync all my photos, and maybe iOS4 calculated that it would take up too much space (although it was fine an hour ago?!?), so I'm going to see what I can do to get the quality back and I'll pot my results.

I can confirm that the app "air sharing" works for this. It basically makes your iPhone into a wireless disk drive. You point a web browser at the IP of your phone and then can upload/download files. The app itself will display the photos with full zoom & portrait/landscape capabilities (tried this with a 3MB jpeg).

Note that the version I am using of this app is the $2.99 iPhone version. I actually downloaded this a long time ago during its free trial, so I did not pay for it. I'm not suggesting you buy this app, only that it may work for you. I do not know if there are other apps similar to this one on the app store, though there probably are.

FYI, I installed this version on both my iPhone 2G and my iPad. The iPhone 2G takes a while to open the 3MB photo, the iPad is pretty snappy though.

OK, so I just synced my iPhone 3GS, with iOS4, a SECOND time, and it did a new "Optimizing Photos..." phase for all 1200+ photos, and then synced the photos a second time.

Now all my pictures look great again. Try re-syncing and see if it fixes anything. My guess is that Apple skimped on the first photo sync so that the whole upgrade process would go faster.

Hope this works for you.

Hi Everyone,

Here's an update for all:

I resynced my iphone again. I had 3200+ pics which is a little over 4 GB.

It took 4 hours to "re-optimize" but everything is back to normal now, pics are nice and sharp again.

Strange that the update wouldn't do a full optimize at first but it appears that if you re-sync Louis, you should be back to normal.

Update everyone Louis so that we can help others with the same problem.

Thanks to all who contributed.

Saul

Hi

I confirmed: pics quality was good again after the second sync... weird.