How to Fix Photos Turning Red on Your iPhone

If you open a photo in the Photos app on your iPhone and it inexplicably starts to turn red, I wouldn’t blame you for being a little worried. After all, It is It’s not supposed to happen, and of all the colors your photos could randomly fade into, red is among the scariest.

As you ponder the angry, vengeful god you may have encountered recently, know that this isn’t necessarily an issue that affects all, or even most, iPhone users and their photos. In fact, it doesn’t seem to affect photos taken on iPhones at all. On the contrary, users reporting this issue see it when zooming in on photos taken on Android devices. It seems a new shade has been added to the iPhone/Android divide: green bubbles, red images.

If this isn’t happening on your own iPhone, you can see the problem manifesting itself in this Reddit post. User djenki0119 posted a screen recording of himself looking through photos on his iPhone that he originally took on a Samsung Galaxy S24. At first, the images appear completely normal. But once Djenki0119 zooms in on each one, it quickly takes on a dark red hue, almost like you’re watching a film developing in a dark room. This user has the same problem, except he took his photo on a Motorola Razr.

At the moment, it is unclear what the actual cause of the problem is. It usually doesn’t matter what type of device took a particular image: once it’s in the Photos app, it should display normally. But there must be something in the Android files that the iOS Photos app isn’t reading correctly, at least when users zoom in on the image. As 9to5Mac points out, it appears something is adding a red filter to these images in the Photos app. Since this problem only recently appeared, I assume there is a bug in iOS 26, although there may be a problem with Android instead.

For what it’s worth, I couldn’t reproduce the issue with photos I sent from my Pixel 8 Pro to my iPhone. But it could be that a strange combination of hardware and software is causing this tint: perhaps a photo taken on a certain type of Android device running a specific version of Android turns red on a certain model of iPhone running a specific version of iOS.

How to Undo a Photo Turned Red on iPhone

Luckily, you don’t need to wait for Apple, Google, Samsung, or Motorola to release a fix, depending on what’s causing the problem. To return your image to its proper color palette, open it in the Photos app, tap “Edit,” then choose “Revert.” This restores the image to its original state and removes the red filter that was unnecessarily superimposed on it.