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December 1, 2008
iPhone software update causes blurry photos
Bug affects only pictures viewed in Photo app
A number of iPhone users have reported that the recent software update, which was released last week, is making images look blurry.
The problem notably affects photos received as email attachments. When viewed in Mail, the attached image appears fine. However, if you select to Save Image and then view the image in the Photos app, the photo appears blurred or fuzzy.
On this Apple Discussions thread, more than half a dozen people have complained about these blurred photos. Other web pages also feature reports of the same symptom and have posted the blurry photos to prove their point.
This seems like a simple case of a bug in the iPhone software. What makes it less simple, however, is that it can be hard to reproduce the bug. Initially, we tried several times, starting with photos in our iPhoto library, and could never duplicate the symptom. We even resized photos, to conform to dimensions that supposedly trip the bug. Still no problem. The Apple Discussions includes several posts from people who similarly have never seen this symptom.
See also: Apple iPhone 3G review
There was one way we were finally able to wind up with a blurry photo: start with a photo taken by the iPhone's own camera (which is a 1,200-by-1,600 pixel image), send that to ourselves via email and then save the emailed image back to our Camera Roll. The resulting photo (which is now a 600x800 pixel image) is blurry when viewed in the Photos app. Oddly (as others have also reported), if we import the blurry photo directly to our Mac, by connecting the iPhone and using Image Capture, the photo is not blurry on the Mac.
In other words, the problem is with how an image displays in the iPhone's Photo app, not with the image itself. Further, the problem seems limited to certain resolutions (600-by-800 being one of them), but not others. It remains unclear (at least to us) exactly why only certain resolutions are affected - although it appears to be related to how the images are scaled to fill the iPhone screen. What is clear is that this will be an annoying problem for anyone that attempts to email an iPhone photo to another iPhone user.
So far, there isn't any work-around to avoid the bug. We assume it will require an update from Apple for this to be resolved.
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Comments received
Songtao said on Saturday, 13 December 2008
I found a working, but very messy, workaround for the problem of blurry photo's with iPhone OS 2.2.
Whenever you have received photos by e-mail that are now displayed blurry, as if the thumbnail is enlarged, run the pictures through the Camerabag app (which everyone should have anyway), set to the highest resolution setting. Save as 'original' and the result is a correctly displaying picture! Delete the one received in the mail and you're done.
As I said, very dirty, but a working hack nonetheless.
Bill Robbins said on Wednesday, 31 December 2008
I have this same issue. My wife and I each hav e iPhones. We like to take picsd with the iPhone and email them to each other. The pics look great in the email app, but once you save them to the camera roll, they go blurry. Looking forward to a fix from Apple...