Blurry image preview and lower resolution in iMovie when importing from Photos on Mac

Hi,

The thumbnails in an iMovie project reference the original in the iMovie library and are moderate resolution thumbnails, intended only for editing purposes. So one would expect some drop in resolution when editing in the project, but not to the point where the image display is "hardly identifiable".

Try deleting preference and see if that solves the issue. To delete preferences, open iMovie while holding down the Option and Command keys and select to delete preferences in the box that appears. iMovie will open in a new empty library. Reopen your old library to get back to your projects. (To reopen your old library close iMovie and go to your Movie folder or wherever you have your old iMovie library stored. Double click on the library’s icon.  iMovie will open in that library.) Possibly you may need to reboot to set the changes.  Deleting preferences is a safe procedure that will not cause data loss or disruption to your project.

If deleting preferences does not solve it, try creating a new project and importing into that one. Sometimes glitches are confined to just one project and do not appear in a newly created project.

As you mention, exporting the clips from Photos (i.e, to your desktop), and then importing into iMovie, would leave you with the original plus two copies (1 in photos, 1 on the desktop, and 1 in iMovie). However, you can then delete the copy exported to your desktop. That would leave you with the original in Photos and one copy in the iMovie library, which is unavoidable no matter what method you may use to import the clips into iMovie.

-- Rich