Photos transferred to Mac from iPhone are of lower quality

Question

Photos transferred to Mac from iPhone are of lower quality

Previously, I was a PC user who would attach my iPhone to my PC, which would recognize the iPhone as a digital camera. I would then navigate to the DCIM folder and grab images I wanted to save straight from there, transfer them to my PC into organized folders, then sync those organized folders back to my iPhone. Everything was lovely.

I've since switched to a Mac and can't quite figure this out. I'm using... "Preview" (?) to transfer images from the phone to the Mac, and I just today noticed that there has been a distinct drop off in photo quality. examples: one image originally 3264x2448, but when it syncs back to the phone, it's 2048x1536. A panorama I shot is 13616x2936, but the synced back version is 4096x883.

I have not checked to see if the problem lies in the process of getting the photos from the phone to the Mac, or from the Mac back to the phone, but I suspect it's the former.

Does anyone know of a way to access the DCIM folder on the iPhone when tethered to a Mac, or another simple way of transferring full quality images?

iPhone 6, iOS 8.3

Posted on Jun 3, 2015 12:14 PM

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Answer 1

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Chris Polubinski Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 4, 2015 5:48 AM in response to Chris Polubinski

After doing some more research, the photos as transferred to my Mac are full sized. It's the process of syncing them back to the iPhone that resizes them. And, it turns out, that is actually a known thing with iTunes.

iTunes "optimizes" any photos it syncs to a device. So, even if the source of a photo is the camera on the device that you're syncing photos back to, it seems to think that those same photos that once displayed fine need some further tweaking, which includes scaling them way down in size/quality.

There used to be a checkbox on the Photo sync tab called "Include full-resolution photos" but that was removed sometime around 2012-ish. The only way to get full resolution photos onto your device now is to host them in a remotely accessible folder, or add them to your device with a third party app.

If, like me, you're frustrated by this, I heartily encourage you to send feedback to Apple through the iTunes contact option and voice your displeasure. Maybe if enough people speak up (and I would wager there are enough by the amount of posts I've been able to find on the subject), someday they'l bring that option back.

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