Some iPhone owners are experiencing an odd glitch with iOS 26 that isn’t doing shared photos any favors: Pictures taken originally on Android phones are appearing tinted in red, and sometimes looking flat gray as soon as they enter the editing window, according to reports from device users.
According to user reports, the issue remains in iOS 12.2 and triggers intermittently on certain devices and file formats, meaning it cannot be easily reproduced on demand.
What users are seeing in the iOS 26 photo tint bug
Complaints, mostly on community forums, describe photos that look normal in the iOS Photos grid but lean toward red when you zoom in. For others, trying to edit the same photo leads to a washed-out, grayed image — as though the luminance data is stripped or applied wrong. Some report the problem not appearing under earlier versions of iOS, indicating a change in the imaging pipeline.
The behavior isn’t universal. Reports have speculated clusters only around specific devices and formats — photos taken with modern Android flagships like Samsung’s Galaxy S24 or Motorola’s Razr line, for example — but some anecdotes suggest that similar oddities can happen even in the context of iPhone-to-iPhone shares. Several testers with newer iPhone models said they were unable to reliably trigger the bug — suggesting that it may depend on certain metadata, color space, and device capabilities.
Importantly, this seems to be localized to the rendering and editing paths of the Photos app. Users opening the same files in a third-party viewer often report regular-looking colors, which seems to further indicate that this is a decode or tone mapping–related issue instead of file corruption.
The likely culprit: HDR and color pipelines
Apple hasn’t weighed in, but imaging engineers are looking at modern HDR photo workflows as the likely culprit. Android 14 introduced Ultra HDR, in which even a basic JPEG file is written with a gain map for recovery of highlight detail on compatible displays. Apple’s platform also supports HDR photography and wide color (Display P3) to a lesser extent, but the company has typically relied on HEIC/HEIF and its own tone-mapping stack.
Zoom and/or entering Edit in the Photos app may switch rendering pipelines. If it misunderstands embedded color profiles (sRGB vs Display P3) or treats a JPEG-with-gain-map asset poorly, red and green channel balance can be subtly off, with too much red making the telltale reddish cast you might see. If dropped-in Edit had a no‑can‑do fallback that was SDR-only, it could simply throw away the gain map, resulting in a flat gray. This is compatible with expecting HDR gain-map formats to degrade gracefully to SDR when metadata is properly read.
Documentation on Android’s Ultra HDR and Apple WWDC sessions on HDR imaging make clear the importance of proper ICC profiles, transfer functions, and tone mapping. A regression or edge case in any of these layers could be why only certain files — and only in particular contexts, such as zoom or edit — look wrong.
Workarounds users say help while awaiting a fix
While we wait for an official fix there are a couple of stop-gaps floating around:
- Edit then Revert: Some users claim that editing the photo in Photos and hitting the Revert button can work around this issue. This is, of course, very frustrating since it has to be done per image.
- Export to SDR: Duplicating the photo and exporting as a standard JPEG in Files app, Mail, or AirDrop to a computer can flatten it into an SDR-safe version that removes the red cast.
- Experiment with a different viewer: Some third-party apps, such as multiplatform library managers, seem to display the same images correctly; this can provide at least accurate viewing until Photos is fixed.
If you have a lot of HDR images from Android devices in your library already, it may be helpful to tag the affected files so you can batch-fix them later and avoid bulk edits in Photos that could lock down an undesirable SDR rendering.
Why this matters for cross-platform photo sharing
Inter-platform photo sharing is standard: industry monitors such as IDC cite Android first inching ahead in global smartphone share, even though iPhone owners regularly swap media with Androidizers.
It doesn’t even matter if only 1% of shared photos happen to fall into a rendering edge case; the number of bad views in absolute terms could still be substantial, considering billions of images are sent daily over messaging apps and through cloud libraries.
The stakes are higher when it comes to HDR. With displays becoming brighter and wider in color gamut, HDR images need accurate metadata to be passed along. Entities like ICC (International Color Consortium) and MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) have focused on dealing with color profiles and gain maps well, having good scars to fall back. When that chain snaps, users feel it at once.
What to watch for next as Apple investigates fix
With a set of easily reproducible reports and small scope, this looks fixable in a point release. A patch would likely address a process in Photos’ HDR decode path, so that it handles gain maps and color profiles uniformly when zooming and editing. Until then, affected users would be well advised to send feedback to Apple through the Feedback Assistant with sample files and device information — the more metadata that makes it into Apple’s system, the sooner engineering can zero in on the regression.
If your Android-shot photos are now inexplicably sunburned when viewed on iOS 26, you’re not alone. Do the Revert trick or export as a standard JPEG for now — and hold off on heavy edits until Apple works out the HDR kinks.
