If Some Photos on Your IPhone Are Inexplicably Turning Red, There’s a Solution.
If you open a photo in the Photos app on your iPhone and it inexplicably starts turning red, I wouldn’t blame you for worrying. After all, it shouldn’t happen, and of all the colors your photos can suddenly turn, red is one of the creepiest.
While you’re pondering what angry and vengeful god you’ve recently encountered, understand that this issue doesn’t affect all, or even most, iPhone users and their photos. In fact, it doesn’t seem to affect photos taken on iPhones at all. Rather, users reporting this issue are seeing it when zooming in on photos taken on Android devices. It seems a new hue has been added to the divide between iPhone and Android: green bubbles, red images.
If you don’t have this issue on your iPhone, you can see it in this Reddit post . User djenki0119 posted a screen capture of himself reviewing photos on his iPhone, originally taken with a Samsung Galaxy S24. At first, the photos look perfectly normal. But as djenki0119 zooms in on each image, they quickly take on a deep red tint—almost like looking at film being developed in a darkroom . This user has the same issue, but he took the photos with a Motorola Razr.
It’s currently unclear what exactly is causing this issue. Typically, it doesn’t matter what device a given photo was taken on: once it’s in the Photos app, it should display normally. However, there must be something in the Android files that the iOS Photos app isn’t reading correctly, at least when users zoom in. As 9to5Mac notes , something appears to be adding a red filter to these images in the Photos app. Since this issue is new, I’m assuming it’s a bug in iOS 26, though it could also be an Android issue.
Incidentally, I couldn’t reproduce the issue with photos I sent from my Pixel 8 Pro to my iPhone. But perhaps there’s some strange combination of hardware and software that causes this color change: perhaps a photo taken on a certain type of Android device with a certain version of Android turns red on a certain iPhone model with a certain version of iOS.
How to Undelete a Photo That Turned Red on iPhone
Luckily, you don’t have to wait for Apple, Google, Samsung, or Motorola to release a fix, depending on where the issue is. To restore the image to its correct color scheme, open it in the Photos app, tap “Edit,” and then select “Undo.” This will restore the image to its original state and remove the red filter that was unnecessarily applied over it.