ios is converting png photos with transparent background

I was looking at a faq from a photo editing app. It had an answer for people having a problem with. PNG files in iOS. It says to go to settings>photos>optimization. Change that setting to "save originals" from "optimize photos" (which saves drive space, but can change the type of photo file).

I am attaching the screenshot of the faq I read, so you can make your own decision. You can always switch back to the optimization setting. I assume that anything already optimized will stay optimized, but new items might stay as transparent PNG's.

*I am not a specialist by any means, so please make your own choices.

I think I found something helpful about the issue of some Apple devices losing the transparency on PNG files and I didn't see anyone posting about what I found so I wanted to share. My gf and I both have Iphones. They're different models but both have the latest software updates. I would send her a PNG file (logo) and when she received it, momentarily it would have transparency, then a couple of seconds later her phone would lose it and turn that image into a JPEG. So after lots of trouble shooting, I compared her Iphone settings to mine to see why the same image on my phone kept it's transparency, but on hers it lost it. Here's what I did. Go to SETTINGS / PHOTOS uncheck the iCLOUD Photos option. Then try saving the image to your phone. Once it's saved to your phone double check the image and make sure it's alpha channeled aka transparent. Then you can turn that iCLOUD setting back on. For some reason when her phone would receive an image, because the iCLOUD Photos option was turned ON, it would merge the layers into a JPEG. I don't pay for the iCLOUD storage and she does so hers is always on and mine is turned off. That was the only difference we found between our phones and it turned out to fix the transparency issues. Hope this helps!

I found this problem today having repeatedly re-doing the creation of pngs with transparent background them importing as a separate layer to discover the white background. My solution was to save the transparent png to Files. Importing from that location works fine.

I have found that if I save my PNG to FILES instead of photos, I retain transparency.

I had this same issue every time after I’ve updated my iPad. I found the only solution is to create a folder for PNGs in files. That seems to be working for me now. I saw a response on another thread from an Apple associate that said if you zoom in it is, in fact, a transparent PNG. That doesn’t work when you try to use it as a transparent PNG. It still has a solid background when you open it anywhere else.

It’s sad that this issue has not truly been resolved by Apple.

i think i know what caused the transparency issue. ive had the problem for YEARS but i believe i have a solution: first, turn off icloud photos in icloud settings. second, go to photo settings and click "keep originals"

thanks to this, i havent had a single transparency issue on my phone.

hope this helps!!

I recently upgraded from an iPhone 8 to a 13, and with the 8 I never had this issue (can't remember what ios it was last running).

But the only work around I've been able to see success with is saving any PNGs I plan to use to my iCloud Drive. And then when I need them on my iPhone, download them to my photo album to use right away. Then delete the PNG from photo album once I'm done using it (before it magically becomes a JPG)...and repeat all these steps each time I want to use a PNG. Extremely tedious, but it seems to be the only way it'll work at this time, for me at least.

I tried turning off the photo optimization thing and it didn’t work, then I turned it off for the Mac or PC transfer option as well. When I did the latter I also turned off iCloud photos and was able to save and upload a transparent png photo to one of my apps that only lets you select from photos, not files. I don’t think Apple wants to deal with larger size PNG files in the cloud even though I pay for extra storage and am nowhere near my 50GB limit.

i don't use apple's icloud services because of the on-device hash scanning, which i felt was a privacy violation. the compression of small PNGs into jpeg and HEIF into jpeg is an on-device issue, even on airplane mode, but it doesn't seem to affect images stored in the Files app, just Photos. it's non-destructive, though, because it will still claim to be a png and copying/pasting it to files keeps the original quality. it seems to be keeping the original but exporting or displaying it as jpeg. i have the Fast Image Viewer app and it will tell me if the png has been compressed.

I’m having the same issue! At first I though it was my fault (wrong color space or something).

In time, though, I’ve come to realize that the photo is kept with a transparent background for some time when I airdrop it from my Mac.

I believe iOS’ storage optimization has something to do with it, since it stores the original file on iCloud and keeps a light low res version of most pictures. Maybe somewhere along this process the “transparent chanenel” is flattened.

Ive come up that theory because whenever I retransferred the “png” file to the iPhone, it wouldn’t work until I deleted and removed from the “Deleted” folder. Then, after syncing the deletion with iCloud I would transfer again and the transparent background would working… temporarily 💩 haha..

I know the process of choosing which images are kept offline is automated. But iOS should give us the option to pick and choose a photo to be kept on the phone.

I've been having this problems for a few months. Every once in awhile it will work and then it adds a white background for weeks. How has Apple not addressed this?? For those of us who make digital art, it's literally costing us money. Today I started a Pinterest only to find they will only upload from the photos app (unless I'm missing something). I've had to purchase storage on Dropbox to get around the issue but, for Pinterest, there doesn't seem to be a workaround

The best way to get this fixed is for everyone call AppleCare and submit a complaint to get this fixed. Also, you can go to Product Feedback - Apple and submit a request that they fix it. The more people that complain, the faster it will be fixed.

I'm still using iOS 14 and I'm also having this issue.

I really need my backgrounds to stay transparent. The only workaround I've found is to save my files to Dropbox and work with them from there but I have to add them there from my pc for that to work and I can only place them in the program I need them in, I don't think if I edited them the background would stay transparent. This is a huge pain and adds extra steps to an already long process.

Please tell me they going to fix this!

i have been having this issue forever. if you copy the image in the Photos app (NOT save to files) and then paste them into the files app, the image is not affected, so it's something local to the Photos app.

but if you try to export the png from the Photos app, it comes out as a png: this only happens to transparent pngs under 1000 KB. i think that this was an intentional design feature on apple's part to save storage space, but at 1 TB storage, i have thousands of PNGs in my files app and it hardly puts a dent.

either this or the initial pauses when playing FLAC audio in Files are my two biggest sources of pain. APNG support in the photos app would be nice too

Check my reply, you can fix this issue by saving the files in Png from photoshop. It totally worked for me