What causes Black Boxes in iPhone 16 Pro Photos?

It's not a hardware issue as far as I can tell, I'm having the exact same issue with my new iPhone 16 Pro Max and iOS 18. I'm updating to 18.1 now to see if this is addressed.

The reason I don't think it's hardware is that if you go into the photo editor, edit the photo either on the desktop or on the phone, and change the key photo from the default one to any of the others, you'll see the original picture again. Sometimes some of the other key photos are also filled with black boxes but you can usually find one or several that don't. This makes me think that the picture is getting captured, but is being corrupted somehow during the storage/processing/upload process.

Anyway, it's not just you. And, it's really annoying.

I have had it happen randomly ever since I found this thread and posted. Hasn't been fixed in any of the latest iOS updates. I'm on 18.2 and it still happens.

For me, though, I have always been able to recover the photo by editing it and changing the key photo to another one in the series. What's bizarre is, if you then save it, go back in, and re-select the original key photo, it's just fine again and you can save it back to the way it should have been to begin with.

I haven't had any photos that became unrecoverable -- yet. Anyone else?

With all of us experiencing this, I'm sure it's not a defective phone -- although it still could be a hardware issue with the 16 Pro Max that needs to be addressed, I just hope they recognize this as an issue, and issue a fix, and that it isn't something in the design of the hardware that makes this impossible to fix.

\marc

You have 15 days from the day of purchase to return it for a full refund no questions asked. I recommend you take it back immediately and get a full refund or a different model iPhone.

Note: if someone else has recommended this my apologies to whomever. I'm replying to the email I got from the ASC.

All of the photos I take are live photos! I can move it to a different key photo and it won't have the black box, but the quality isn't as clear

It has to be an iOS 18 issue - there's a reddit thread and people are experiencing this issue on iPhone 14 and 15 pros/pro maxes.

I'm planning on going to the Apple store again next week. Not sure what they'll be able to do, but I'm hoping going in person will be more effective.

Are the black boxes in the actual image, or is it only Photos.app the viewer that generates them as overlays in certain conditions?

So if you export originals via USB to a Mac (or set AirDrop to export the original with "All Photos Data" option), are the black boxes still there if you open the image in Preview.app?

i’m not entirely sure. but i suspect the issue has something to do with either 1. saving the photos in High Efficiency instead of Most Compatible; or 2. capturing in 16:9 and not 4:3 format. so my suggestion would be to choose Most Compatible in photo settings first, and if the issue persists then try capturing photos in 4:3.

I’ve been having the same issue with my iPhone 16 pro max. Started the day after I got the phone. It happened 3 times within the first few weeks of having the phone. Took it to apple, they didn’t know what to do so they gave me a new phone. I’ve been having the same issue with the replacement phone too, it’s happened 4 times now. It’s so frustrating - random black bars, in different spots and sizes. I’ll have 5 of the same photo and 1 will randomly have a black bar. I always take Live Photos and the black bars aren’t in the live when you hold it down, just in the still shot. This just happened yesterday, using iOS 18.1

This has happened 7 times with 2 different phones, here’s one them:

So this is interesting. I've had the problem since day one in Nov 24. It's still happening on 18.4.1 today. But I've discovered that if I use ACDSee Mobile to transfer the images to my PC, there will be two versions of each photo. One version named *.HEIF and the other *.Original.HEIF. The HEIF version is 16:9 as I had used that format to take the pic. The Original.HEIF version is 4:3 and is a low resolution pic. I shall post the images below to illustrate my point. An image is worth a thousand words.

Update: I went back to Apple a few weeks ago. Since this has happened on 2 different iPhone 16 pro maxs, they thought it was a software issue. They wiped my phone and factory reset it. Took a photo today aaaaaand it had black boxes! This is now the 8th photo I’ve had this happen on - software is updated to iOS 18.2.

Apple wasn’t able to fix the photos. I had the same issue on the new iPhone they gave me. I went back to Apple, they wiped the phone and factory reset it. I’m still having the same issue with black boxes. I’m going to go back for a third time and see what they say.

On mine they’re not live photos and don’t know how to recover them at all so I start taking live photos hoping it won’t happen, so far so good and at 1st I thought this issue is only on iPhone 16s but thanks for mentioning that it might be iOS 18 as other iPhone 14/15 users having the same prob

This was an interesting finding. I also tried with a photo I had which had some black boxes, and after cranking all the exposure and brightness of the picture I could see some details on the black boxes. This got me thinking, is this somehow related to the image pipeline and the phone mis-recording the data on the multiple pictures it takes with different exposure levels?

Yup; I have the same issues of black boxes obliterating some of the frame.

i’ll try taking live off in future and see if this makes a difference…

Hi Marc, did you manage to fix the photos that have been corrupted? I have the same problem and I only got my iPhone 16 Pro for more than a month, I have the latest iOS and it still happening on mine. Anyone knows if Apple’s doing anything about it?