Blurry After Editing

Just signed up here to vent my frustration at this. I've experienced this exact issue for as long as I can remember, having owned various MacBooks for 15+ years. There are also reports of this bug going as far back as 2008 (After editing, photos now look blurry - Apple Community)... 15 years without a proper fix is honestly absurd.

The fact that Apple (suppliers of the most expensive and supposedly "capable" laptops for creatives/professionals), have let this bug fester for so long really is a complete joke. Personally, couple that with the fact that I've just dropped £10k+ on camera gear, and yet cannot edit the photos on my £2k MacBook due to useless software... its infuriating stuff.

I've attempted to report this via the online chat. However, the support agent unfortunately wasn't able to simply elevate it to the relevant team without having me jump through a hundred loops first. I did find find a separate feedback form for submitting Photos bug reports here - Feedback - Photos - Apple.

I'd recommend anybody that comes across the issue here to also submit a bug report using the above form. Other than that I'm out of ideas.

Side note: Rotating doesn't fix this for me. I'm editing 150mb .AWR files from the Sony A7RV, which seems to make things even more unstable for me. I used to have maybe 1/10 edited photos going blurry with my lower megapixel camera. Since upgrading, EVERY single photo becomes blurry after editing with no temporary fix available other than reverting the changes ☹️.

I have just Googled this issue and found this thread of comments about exactly the problem I am having. I upgraded to Ventura on my MacBook Pro a few weeks ago (I was delaying an upgrade as still using 32 Bit software!). I did not have this problem prior to upgrading when I was using Mojave.

I uploaded RAW files taken with my Canon 5D Mk3 today. I have exactly the same problem that as soon as I edit them, when I return to the general view screen they are blurred - only the edited version not the untouched ones. I did not have this problem when using an older version of OSX.

If what others have said is true - in that this is a recognised problems of well over a year - it is totally ridiculous. I should not have to purchase expensive 3rd party software simply to overcome a bug from Apple on kit that is incredible expensive.

As a footnote, I did try the fix of rotating 90 degrees in Edit, saving, re-entering Edit mode and then rotating back again and saving but the image was still blurred when I returned to the general view.

As the original post is well over a year ago from 2022, has anyone been able to discover a fix or patch to resolve this? Thanks everyone in advance - I know we are all incredibly frustrated by this!!

@dgr27 two things - apparently the new OSX Sonoma has not resolved this issue for many users and secondly as I explained in my comment, my 2017 MacBook Pro does not support this new version of OSX.

It's so, so,so frustrating, and is making me question my choice of computer.

Great find! To confirm, I edited a "blurry" image and rotated 90º, clicked Done, edited again, rotated back 90º, clicked Done and now edited image is retained in Library. Seems like I have to do this for every edited image to maintain the results of the edit.

I guess we should try to report the bug in Apple feedback.

So are you saying it’s okay for this long-standing bug to go unfixed because of my choice of camera? Like I said, I’ve also experienced this issue over the years using photos taken with various other cameras.

Also, what exactly makes Apple Photos give-away? I’m paying a premium for Apple products and the apps that are built in are part of the Apple ecosystem. I expect them to work as they’re designed to without any major flaws making them unusable.

Further to that, I have over a decade of personal photos in my Photos library, sorted into albums, geo-tagged, with various Photos-only metadata applied. Migrating everything into another app isn’t trivial. 

I’m not interested in the bloatware that comes with Adobe Lightroom and often don’t need to make more than a few adjustments to my photos. When I do need to, I’ll use other software that I have available. 

And where does Apple say that Photos is "aimed squarely at folks shooting with a phone and sharing across devices”? I must’ve missed that bit.

There’s no reason to be an Apple apologist. A bug fix is all that’s required here.

@tomfw, it's not your choice of camera - I am using a Sony AR7 IV creating RAW files (called .ARW).

MacBook Air M2 Ventura 13.6.4. running Photos Version 8.0 and have the same exact issue. (@Brian Hartmann - As you can see, I'm on an M2)

Wrote some more about it on this thread over here:

Raw photos low resolution after editing (… - Apple Community

I agree it's frustrating. I guess I will have to upgrade as dgr27 and Yer_Man. Was holding off as a third party app I use a lot isn't compatible with Sonoma just yet...

I'll give that a try, but I believe there is some kind of software conflict with Photos.

I tried running Photos on another computer (M1 vs Intel) with the same images and I could not reproduce the problem. No blurry images on the second computer. More testing to follow...

I've begun experiencing this problem though there were some issues with edits not saving dating back before I updated to Ventura. I sent a bug feedback report to Apple and I hope there is some acknowledgement of the problem and they are working to fix it. I'm going to contact them directly tomorrow. If anyone has gotten a response please let us know. This is driving me nuts and has really dented my enthusiasm for the brand.

I contacted Apple about this and the Apple help staff member didn't seem aware of the problem or how to fix it. He spoke to his manager who said it was fixed in the latest update so I installed it but it didn't change anything and the problem still exists. There is nothing in the release notes that says a bug for Photos was fixed either. It seems Apple know about the problem but haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.

I also have this blurry image problem after editing files and it's driving me crazy......

Another new problem is that it's inconsistently only transferring some images across when I request to email images. And some are transferring as RAW files in the camera file version = .ARW Sony files that are massive in size while others are .jpeg and other ones I highlight don't appear in the email at all....

Hi. Did you contact Apple? I would like to know what they said. The CS guy I spoke to didn't seem to know there was a problem or how to fix it but there must be someone on the Photos development team who knows. It's been two months now and the problem still exists.