Transfer photos to another iPhone and edit them there (turn Portrait off, change back to colour, or change depth)

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Level 1

6 points

Transfer photos to another iPhone and edit them there (turn Portrait off, change back to colour, or change depth)

I took lots of photos with my boyfriend's iphone, and I wanna transfer them to my iphone.

They're in portrait (f 4.5) and with a black-and-white filter. On his phone, I can edit the photos (change the depth to another f number, turn portrait off, or change them back to colour). But when I transfer some photos to my iphone, I can't make those type of edits on them (I can apply a colour filter but that filter gets put over the black-and-white so it becomes reddish black-and-white, I can't get it back to showing colours. The depth button doesn't appear at all, and the portrait button doesn't respond when you click on it).

Is it never possible to edit those things on a different iphone, or is there something I need to do before/while transfering them to enable that? I already transfer them as heic (but maybe some program messes with them while transferring them from Downloads folder to Photos folder)

iPhone 11 and 14, both IOS 26

Posted on Mar 20, 2026 2:58 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Richard.Taylor

Level 6

18,475 points

Mar 21, 2026 7:43 AM in response to FloraJansen

As Servant of Cats explained, Photos is a non-destructive editor. If you edit or crop a picture, maybe cutting off the sides or intensifying the color, the original file is never touched. Instead, your editing steps are stored in the Photos Database. It's the same for every kind of edit, keyword, comment that you do-- the original picture is not altered, but the information is stored in the Database. So the picture you see on the screen never existed as a file-- it is constructed on the fly from the original plus the information in the database. The edited picture doesn't become a file until you use Export it. Even then, what you get can depend on the parameters you indicate. Any picture you export from Photos is always a fraction of all the information that's in the database. So there are lots of different pictures that could be made from the same information, and you can always access the Original Unmodified Original.

On an iPhone Share>Save to Files exports an edited copy like what's seen on the screen, and you get some Options about things to include. Or you can choose Share>Export Unmodified Original to get the original files without any edits for added comments. If you have an external drive plugged in to the phone, then you can send the exports directly there.

To get the full information associated with the picture, it has to never leave the Photos environment. So with iCloud Photos, pictures can be transferred while kept in the system, and you can get all the information from the Photos database.

Let us know if you need more detail…

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Answer 2

Mar 20, 2026 6:38 PM in response to FloraJansen

If you edit a photo, Photos likes to keep a copy of the original photo, and the latest edit, grouped together as one "photo" in its library. Because of that, you can, e.g., go into Edit mode on a Mac, and "Revert to Original" to undo something like the application of a black-and-white filter. I'd assume that Photos on the iPhone works in a similar fashion – after all, the two can synchronize their Photos databases via iCloud.

On the other hand, when you export a photo or send a photo to someone else, a lot of times, that would be just a copy of the edited photo, or a copy of the original – not a package with both.

So if you sent the edited photo, something like a black and white filter might be "baked in".

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