All photos appear dark on iPhone and Mac

There might be something about your user account or your Photos Library.

Test the Library: Export a few of the pictures that seem dark to some folder, maybe on your desktop. To see about the Library, try making a small test Library and drag those few pictures in it and see if they appear dark in this new Library. You can create a new Library by closing Photos and then option-clicking on the Photos icon. You get this Library Chooser window:

This Library won't be your System Library, so it won't connect to your iCloud Photos. In this case, you're creating a test Library, of course, but you can see here that I have a bunch of Libraries that I switch between. The path to the selected one is shown below the list, and they all stay in the Pictures folder. You can switch from one to the other by just going to the Pictures folder and double clicking on the one you want to use. Or you can pull up this "Library Chooser" to pick the Library you want. You'll want to go back to your System Library for normal activity, of course.

If the pictures behave normally, then we know the problem is with the Library. If the pictures are still dark, then you should test the User account.

To test your User account, you should first put your new Library where another user can get to it. You would need to temporarily move that Library out of your own user's Pictures folder up to the general "Users" folder, maybe making a new "Public" folder there. I seem to have named mine "New Folder of Pictures."

You could put some of the problem pictures there, too. Then you can make a new user in System Settings>Users and Groups. It's kind of fun to enter a brand new fresh user account! From there, you can double click on the Photos Library that you moved, and you can see if the pictures are dark for this new User. That will tell us if there is a problem with your own User account.

A little more complicated, but what do you think?

Tom Perkins1 wrote:

FIRST, THANK YOU FOR YOUR PROMPT REPLY!

TAHOE 26.2

ALL PHOTOS NEW AND OLD

I THINK I USE ICLOUD PHOTOS. (I AM A TECHNO IMPAIRED SENIOR...)

I DON'T THINK I USE OPTIMIZER STORAGE. THAT IS, NOTHING RINGS A BELL

SURE ENOUGH THE ICLOUD PHOTOS ARE NORMAL AND NOT DARK!!

So, you do use iCloud! That's good. You can see about "Optimize" at Settings>[name]>iCloud>Photos

So it seems the bug is in Photo software...

I wouldn't thinK it's a bug, since I don't see it. Clearly your MacAir M2 is plenty up to date! We know the pictures are OK, since they are good at iCloud.com. The pictures on your Mac are exactly the same.

On the Mac, try these two things:

To narrow things down, try these steps:

• Restart the computer (of course)
• Re-start in Safe Mode. This bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes, and it often helps. Safe Mode is different for different computers, so see this: 

           Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support 

For safe mode, I'd write down the instructions (or print them) -- it's not at all hard, but I always have to look up the sequence, and I'll forget halfway through!

I'll be curious what happens…

What iOS are you using?

By all photos, do you include older ones that used to look OK?

Do you use iCloud Photos? If so, do you use Optimize Storage? How do the pictures look at iCloud.com?

What is your storage on this iPhone? At Settings>General>iPhone Storage, my phone says 50.5 GB of 128 GB used. What does yours say? Do you have more than 10% free storage on your iPhone?

Have you looked at the Photographic Styles at Settings>Camera?

Let us know…