iPhone 17PM, iOS 26 photos not loading

[KTK1990]

I was looking at my photos and a few of them are just black. If I pinch to zoom in then it will show part of the picture but there are certain blocks that are missing. If I zoom in further than some blocks will load but others will still be black. I took a screenshot of the photos app showing the blocks. If I flick up to show the image attributes it also shows just black.
Does anyone know why this is happening and only on some pictures? I haven’t seen it happen before today.

 

[chown33]

I think the first thing to do is to determine if the problem lies with the files or with the Photos app. The best way I can think of to check the files is to look at them on another device. You could email them, or use some other transfer method.

Another possible way to examine the photo files is if they're synced to iCloud, do they show the same thing (black blocks of missing data) when you login to your iCloud account using a web browser, then look at the stored photos. If so, then the problem is almost certainly with the files. How that happened won't be addressed by this check, only whether the file itself contains valid data or not.

One thing to watch out for if doing a file transfer is that the receiving device will need to be able to read the HEIF format. If not, then be sure to export or share a more compatible format, like JPEG.

One last thing to look at on another device is whether the black areas are entirely black, or whether there might be some actual image data there. One way to do that is to select a part of a black area and then adjust the exposure controls, or contrast, or RGB curves. If there's any image data present it might be made visible by such adjustments.

 

[KTK1990]

Thank you, I tried looking at them on my iPad which was downloading it from iCloud and it had the same issue. I plugged my phone into my Mac and exported the photo via image capture and it showed a full black window, I rotated the photo 4 times and it showed most of the picture but the black box was in the same spot. It looks like the image was corrupted in one section and that broke the entire image. I forgot about switching to try and see if exporting a jpeg would fix it but if the image was corrupted then it may not work. I did text the photo to someone and it showed as blank in iMessage and the recipient said they could not see the photo.

I do wonder if it was a hardware or software issue. I went through the images I took and did not see this issue on any other photos. From last Monday until today I took about 3800 photos, only one has the issue and was taken Sunday when I took multiple photos quickly (though I was taking multiple quickly many times that weekend and in some cases a lot more in a previous session).

 

[chown33]

I think you've correctly narrowed it down to a problem that's limited to individual image files.

What was the OS version at the time? Have you rebooted since the glitch happened?

I can't think of a way to determine whether it was due to a hardware or a software issue. If you take the iPhone into an Apple Store, they should be able to run diagnostics on it and maybe see if anything shows up.

 

[KTK1990]

I rebooted a few times and tried chatting with Apple who didn’t provide too much help. They said taking 4,000 pics in a weekend is a heavy and high-volume task that would strain the phone (though quite a bit of it was pressing the screenshot button while taking a video). It’s a 17 pro max running 26.4.

I ended up exporting everything to my Mac via image capture and sorted everything in folders and deleted them all off my phone. If it happens again I’ll stop by the Apple Store or see if they can do a remote diagnostics via chat/call. Since only one square was not being displayed, to me it seemed like the phone renders the image in blocks and one of the blocks was corrupted and the phone/ipad/Mac saw a corrupted image and failed to display it and only displayed when it was zoomed in or edited but that corrupt square stayed a black block.

 

[chown33]

Here's the Wikipedia article on HEIF:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format

The list of editing software that support HEIF might be worth a look. One of them may give you more info about the blacked-out block.