Old photos stuck in low res - 'Export Unmodified Original' doesn't work

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Level 1

9 points

Old photos stuck in low res - 'Export Unmodified Original' doesn't work

Certain old photos (circa 2007) in my Photos library are very low resolution (240x240 px), even when choosing "Export Unmodified Original."

Seems that at some point iCloud deleted the original file? Is there anyway to get these back? I have no idea when they were changed.

Other weird thing is it's only certain photos—like 1 out of every 5. I'm guessing it's because they were edited in a previous version of Photos/iPhoto, and the original file was corrupted or lost at some point during a software update or device migration?

I have iCloud Photos turned on, as well as "Download Originals to this Mac." Running Photos v10.0 on Mac Mini M1 2020, OS Sequoia 15.6.

Any ideas on how to recover the original versions of these photos? Thanks

Mac mini, macOS 15.6

Posted on Aug 18, 2025 10:52 AM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

165,516 points

Aug 18, 2025 02:58 PM in response to jqflem

These sound very like they are the thumbnails from maybe an old iPhoto Library. You can get this happening if, at some point in history, one library was imported to another. This often happened in the past at upgrade time, or when a library migrated from one machine to a new one or similar. It really has nothing to do with iCloud.

There really is no way to recover the master files.

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Answer 2

Aug 19, 2025 07:11 AM in response to jqflem

As Yer_Man says, Photos doesn't have the Original files in its database. Except for some pre-made thumbnails and previews (used to speed up scrolling through pictures,) editing and other operations depend on those originals. Edited pictures are just the Originals modified with your editing steps. Edited pictures aren not themselves kept as files.

Your only recourse is to find those originals in old backups somewhere.

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