ios is converting png photos with transparent background

I don’t have license for photoshop. Do you have to buy a license for it to work? I was using 3D paint.. but it kept converting back to white background after a few use. … your photoshop’s still remains as transparent after a month? Thanks. (I know it’s early for you to determine… if yours will convert automatically for some reason)

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

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.

So you are saving them as a .psd file instead of a .png?

I was experimenting with this the other day and I don’t this it is the photo app that’s causing this as I had it working when I wasn’t connected to Wi-Fi. Later after the file uploaded to the iCloud photos that’s when I lost the transparency. I believe the solution offered earlier of uploading the PNG to iCloud Drive would work.

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.

They launched this slowly after iOS 13. I managed to get around it by not syncing my phone to iCloud for awhile but then I got a new phone and here we are. A complete an utter disregard to creatives Apple. The supposed “artists” technology. If this isn’t reverted back, I will be dropping max products. Destroyed my content process for work. But hey, they don’t care about creators, we’re a minority user group in comparison to there total user base. The worst part is, I’d be willing to pay for more iCloud storage to support the larger PNG files. Apple, you’re literally missing out on an opportunity to collect MORE MONEY from me like always. So my question to Apple, since you make campaigns for creatives, minorities, and LGBTQ… how does this shift align with your PR?

It doesn’t.

I’ll give you guys 1 month to revert it back. Then I’m out, and I’m not someone you want out.

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.

Yes, I agree. They could fix this by allowing the user to choose if a file is to be optimized or not, or if they just didn't optimize PNG files since they are already optimized... I will say, I'm unsure if Apple actually watches these communities. If everyone will contact AppleCare or submits feedback we can hopefully get this fixed.

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 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

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.

you can Change your color filters and other settings when you open the camera look for all your settings and change your filters if they still repeat the problem you should call Apple support for more of a look into your issue

Same issue for me. Images worked in iOS14, now they have either a black or white background now in iOS15.