Portrait type photos are corrupted (grey area appear) when transferring from iPhone to PC

So, I no longer care about the #greyareagate bug and have since incorporated the new unapologetic Apple "feature" into my workflow as follows:

1. assume I'm running the latest and greatest non-beta iOS version on the iDevice (do not select Most Compatible option for exporting)
2. make sure the Win10 machine is updated, including iCloud and iTunes (from the Windows AppStore), and FastStoneViewer
3. connect iDevice via USB cable and download all photos from iPhone with FSV (automagically sort into daily folders)
4. in the iDevice open the Photos app, open the Portrait Mode tag/filter/container/whatever, select all photos and export to a temp folder on iCloud using the Files App
5. wait for my Win10 machine to sync with iCloud
6. use Windows PowerToys to quickly rename the Portrait Mode photos to include the *E* on the filename
7. move/replace (or copy to new folder if you want to keep the #greyareagate abominations)
8. give yourself a pat on the back and send a thank you tweet to Mr. Tim Apple for the great job his doing running the show /s

Life is short. Cheers,

Hi Peter,

I'm having a hard time with the same!

I've been calling Apple Support during the last two weeks, let's no talk about the miss commitment from their supervisors/managers promising callbacks they never complete; but after escalating this to their "engineering support" the solution was "change to the most compatible option so you'll have no issues while exporting your photos".

This is the most ridiculous answer I ever got from any kind of customer care/tech support, HEIF and HEVC libraries on my Windows PC are up and running, only HEIC files coming out from portrait mode regardless from wide/telephoto lenses are going wrong. For some reason every single HEIC file containing the final and processed image is coming up with the gray area at the bottom.

Attach you'll see an example of the same photo using the photo viewer from Windows 10 Pro Build 20H2 updated as of today Nov 24th 2020, and a third party app (Adobe Photoshop) throwing up the same result.

I've made a whole test using the wide and telephoto lenses on my iPhone 11 Pro Max. I sent this album to a manager and the "engineering support" so they can review it.

I'm expecting a callback by thursday Nov 26th at 8:00 PM CST, I'll update this topic in case more people are going through this BS.

For research purposes, feel free to download and review the photos by yourself. Definetly something going wrong here: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AlIXGCmwqXuPgiREZhks2_NYTjD5?e=tBrPjT

Best regards,

Walter

Wait, maybe I was wrong, how do to extract multiple images from one HEIC?

Because the size is almost the same, I think they both have the original.

The correct HEIC is 813,922 bytes and identified as a HEIC by imagemagick

"HEIC 1836x2417 1836x2417+0+0 8-bit sRGB 0.016u 0:00.001"

The corrupted HEIC is 814,434 bytes and identified as JPEG by imagemagick

"JPEG 1836x2417 1836x2417+0+0 8-bit sRGB 814434B 0.000u 0:00.000"

But then opening it, I get "premature end of JPEG file"

I have "keep originals" checked in the iPhone settings.

The binary info is very different between the two:

Wow - just transferred photographs from my sister's birthday party and a few days afterwards.

Using iPhone 12 mini, latest 14.6 software, still in warranty.

Transferred with "Keep Originals" in latest Windows 10, using "CUT" to preserve "Creation Date" and other metadata in a fresh folder on the Desktop.

While the first ones look fine, many - including with my little niece - are ruined.

As I used "CUT", the original is no longer in the iPhone.

SHOCKING that a "premium" product should produce such shoddy results, and even worse there's no solution or feedback here after 256 days since the complaint was raised.

This could be interesting.

I recently scanned an A3+ size poster, to a hefty 10MB jpeg file on my PC

Emailing it to myself just now before getting on the bus, but on my iPhone 12 I now see our old friend ‘grey chunks’.

Perhaps that can help Apple solve it - I don’t think they care though.

Hi everyone,

I can confirm that this issue still exist with latest iOS 15.2 and Windows 11.

Nothing got changed since this issue was initially reported.

Disappointing.

I'm on Windows 11 now, all the updates on my iPhone 12, have just bulk downloaded a load of images - still the same.

I've noticed though - I have my camera set to 'crop / zoom to widescreen' on all images. It seems to be these images that corrupt - the true originals transfer just fine, as here.

Sorry, I said the wrong thing in my previous comment. I meant to say it is “Automatic “ that causes iPhone to frequently disconnect when transferring data and requires a Windows reboot to get it to connect again. That feature just doesn’t work for more than just a few photos and I’ve tried it on multiple Windows machines. Consequently “Keep originals” is what must be used but that is what causes it to transfer as HEIC with a grey bar.

”Most compatible” on its own (without “automatic “ ) also fixes the issue but isn’t suitable for HDR, cinematic video etc, so likewise isn’t a viable solution.

Tried again transferring the photo's from my Iphone12 with the latest IOS 15.3 to my Windows 10 Surface Pro notebook. Still nothing's changed.

Yes they haven’t fixed it. Have you seen my workaround above?

"100% photo quality" is not true, @Ryder_del_fin. Just confirmed the photos are NOT full quality in the iCloud Download folder. I thought they were but I have checked again and they are only half the resolution of the original.

e.g. the photo transferred from my iPhone to computer: Resolution is about half when downloaded from iCloud, as it is when transferred by USB or whatever to the computer itself, which is when it gets the grey bar. The same reduction in resolution happens for unedited photos. Below is an example. It shows the file downloaded from iCloud is 1536 x 2048 is about half the size of the same file transferred from my iPhone to computer which is 3024 x 4032 (the latter is the same photo - I always rename it when copying direct from iPhone).

Please fix this Apple! Your claims of high quality camera on iPhone are meaningless if you cannot get the photos off the phone with the same photo quality.

Hi Walter

I'm so glad I found this posting, because having exactly the same problem, except I'm not using Windows but a Linux PC for downloading photos and videos from an iPhone 11, for processing / converting HEIC format with open-source tools (libheif, from GitHub). Everything goes well, except with files IMG_EXXXX.HEIC. A graphics program shows an incomplete image, similar to yours, and the heif to jpeg converter gives an error.

Clearly, this is not a problem with Windows.

Did you get that callback?

Jo

Hi Jo,

My apologies for the delay updating this post, sadly no, they didn't call me back (again). So I've call them and I was told "engineering support" still working on it, honestly, I don't belive they're Apple Engineers and neither they're "investigating/addressing the issue".

Indeed, files named IMG_EXXXX.HEIC are the ones going wrong. Glad you've specified you're going through the same with libheif on Linux, so ONCE AGAIN (excuse my tone, this is on Apple) we can conclude this is definitely not an issue with ours operative systems. Looks Apple (that's what I can say based on my recent experience dealing with them) just want to blame we're not MacOS users.

I'm supposed to get another callback anytime next week, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Best regards,

Walter

Boots are disgusting, but you've reach the next level. I don't think you've read everything I wrote, otherwise you wouldn't give me those "advises".

Thanks for your trouble but please do not reply unless you have a real based-software solution. Level and posts aren't everything when you talk to users who knows what they're doing.

Hello Walter

Thanks for replying. (After I read your initial post I have no desire to file a duplicate report of a bug they already know about.) My spouse skipped the updates after iOS 13.6 and on that phone I still see the IMG_EXXXX.JPG files with the portrait background blurred and no gray artifacts. I don't recall noticing any problems in 13.7 either. I'm guessing it's a bug new to iOS release 14. Hopefully they'll recognize this as a problem and fix it soon. The workaround (letting the phone create jpeg files) isn't great, because the files are a lot larger.

Best.

Jo