Photos appear pixellated/low-res in mobile app

Report · May 11, 2024

Hi there,

Sorry if there's already an answer to this question in this community but I couldn't find it (to be honest, I'm also not great at understanding how to find answers...). I have pin-sharp photos of birds on my laptop app of the cloud-based Lightroom, which automatically synch to my mobile app. But when I click on photos in the mobile app, they are no longer pin-sharp, and when I try and share or export them from my phone app, the low resolution is retained. They look pixellated or low resolution, or as if the image hasn't fully loaded. I could be wrong, but I don't recall this always being the case in the past. This isn't an import settings issue, as it is purely to do with how synched photos appear in the mobile app. Is there something I'm doing wrong, or a setting I need to change?

The mobile app version is 9.2.2 on an iphone 13 (IOS 17.4.1), and my laptop app is 7.2 WAS x64 on a HP Spectre X360 circa 2021.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Andy

Thanks,

Andy

Report · May 12, 2024

On your iPhone, select one of the affected images in Lightroom mobile then tap on the cloud icon upper right. What is file type is listed under "LOCAL" and what is listed under "CLOUD BACKUP"?

Report · May 19, 2024

Hi Jim,

Sorry, I only just saw your reply. On the image in question, it says "smart preview" under Local, and "Original NEF" under Cloud backup. I checked another image that isnt pixellated when you zoom in, and it said more or less the same thing (except it said Original DNG rather than Original NEF. Not sure why).

I saw that it had the option to download the original, so I did this and it made the image much sharper. Does this mean that the roughly 25mb raw photo is now saved on my device? In that case, I guess I shouldn't download too many as it'd take up lots of space on my phone.

Thanks,

Andy

Report · May 20, 2024

Generally speaking, I find that using smart previews locally on my mobile devices is OK, with no obvious signs of them being pixellated or low resoltion. One obvious area of concern would be if the original image has been heavily cropped, because that could easily produce the effect that you are seeing. The Smart Preview is generated from the full size original image, and is 2560 pixels on the long edge, but if the original image has been cropped to say 50% then that crop is also applied to the Smart Preview when it is shown to you on the mobile device, so the image would be only 1280 pixels on the long edge (or less if the crop is more than 50%), which could then cause pixellation.

For the images that appear pixellated, check the cropped dimensions compared with the original image dimensions.

Regarding downloading originals in such situations, Lightroom should automatically remove them in favour of a smart preview over time, but at any time you can use the "Clear Cache" command which should remove such downloaded originals (provided the "Only Download Smart Previews" setting is still enabled).

Report · May 30, 2024

Hi Jim,

Thanks for this detailed reply, and apologies again for the delayed response - life got in the way...

The image in question was cropped quite significantly, but even with the cropping, the detail in the cropped image on my laptop screen was so much higher than the smart preview on my phone. For example, I could see the individual strands of a bird's feather, but on the smart preview this was all just blurred. When I downloaded the image in my mobile, this detail all came back and it was much sharper. This doesn't seem to tally with your experience, as you said smart previews didn't result in a loss of detail in most cases, so I'm still wondering if there's something else about my set-up that's different. But the main thing is I now have a way of getting sharper images on my phone, so that's really helpful, thanks.

Thanks for the heads-up on the 'clear cache' function. I've now found this

Report · May 30, 2024

The image in question was cropped quite significantly, but even with the cropping, the detail in the cropped image on my laptop screen was so much higher than the smart preview on my phone.

By @Andy Baines

That's because the Lightroom desktop app on your laptop will always download the original for editing, even if you have also downloaded Smart Previews. But LrM on your phone doesn't do that if you have "Only download smart previews" enabled.....so you are comparing a heavily cropped original with a heavily cropped smart preview, and you've now seen the potential consequences of that.

All I'm saying is that you have to be alive to the implications of using smart previews only on your phone....I said "generally these are OK", but that also means that there will be times when it's not OK, as you have discovered. For folks that have their originals in the cloud, we have an easy workaround (i.e. use the "get this original" command), but for those that sync their images from LrC to the cloud they don't have any such remedy, as all that is in the cloud will be smart previews, and for those heavily cropped images there's not really a solution.

Report · May 30, 2024

Ahhh, ok now I understand! Thanks for your patient explanation, that makes perfect sense now. Much appreciated, Jim