iCloud photos not loading full quality on iPhone

Question

iCloud photos not loading full quality on iPhone

Hi.

I have an iPhone 7+. I have iCloud photos enabled, I have the 50gb plan.

For some reason, the photos saved on iCloud will not load with full quality.

They show up low resolution, and I can see the small white circle that tries to load the photos but it doesn’t.

Restarting the device temporarily solves the problem, but it comes back the next day.

Before you ask, YES I have plenty of storage left in the cloud.

YES I have continuous internet connection.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Nov 13, 2018 6:36 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

gail from maine

Level 9

52,633 points

Nov 13, 2018 9:34 PM in response to elvifromalbania

It's not the iCloud Storage that is the concern, it is the iPhone Storage. How much storage is taken up by your Photos when you go to Settings>your name>iCloud>Manage Storage?

How much storage do you have available on your device when you go to Settings>General>iPhone Storage?

When you are using iCloud Photos, and you have Optimize Storage turned on, then iCloud Photos automatically manages how many of your iCloud Photo Library photos are going to display in a Full Resolution mode, based on the amount of memory you have available. As you need memory, it changes the photos to a thumbnail version that you can download by tapping on the photo:

iCloud Photo Library Help - Apple Support

iCloud Photo Library - Getting Started

Best,

GB

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Answer 2

Nov 14, 2018 1:28 PM in response to gail from maine

In iCloud, photos take 22 GBs out of 50.

On my iPhone, I have 5 GBs free.

However I think you didn’t understand my question fully.

After a restart, the thumbnail photos are downloaded when I tap on them.

Example:

- I open an old photo. It is not full resolution, so I wait a few seconds and it now is full resolution.

- A day goes by, I go back to the same picture, it is again low resolution, I wait for it and it downloads.

- ANOTHER day goes by, that picture is again low resolution. I tap on it, and the small white circle WILL NOT load.

- This happens to EVERY picture that is currently in iCloud and not downloaded locally.

- I perform a restart, everything starts to work fine for 1 or 2 days.

- Repeat

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Answer 3

Nov 16, 2018 7:42 AM in response to elvifromalbania

That's because you do not have enough available memory on your device to keep those full-res photos on your device unless you either delete some photos or free up memory some other way. If you only have 5GB free on your iOS device, you are not playing with a lot of available memory.

Optimize Photos is going to optimize as many photos as often as needed when the space on your device starts running so low that it may start affecting performance.

Best,

GB

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iCloud photos not loading full quality on iPhone

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