iPhone 14 Pro taking postage stamp-sized photos

Gozoman wrote: As described below I'm simply dragging the photos from my phone to my desktop.

iPhone Photos doesn't really work like that--I think your HP Spectre 360 laptop is confused, and it's just seeing thumbnails. Drag & Drop just isn't supported. Here's what Apple says:

Transfer photos and videos from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac or PC - Apple Support

And here's what Microsoft says (I can't believe I'm referring to a Microsoft link!):

Microsoft import-photos-and-video s-from-an-iphone-to-pc

Weird. Describe your iPhone camera settings and workflow where you see such low res images in detail.

Make sure NOT to drag and drop images from Photos library because that might output only thumbnails. Also make sure that some email or social media (Facebook, WhatsApp etc) loop does not downsample the images, for example.

Gozoman wrote:

As described below I'm simply dragging the photos from my phone to my desktop.

Oh, OK, you are dragging them wrong ;-] Don't do that.

ps. I had a co-worker I used as acid test for our new HIS/RIS/PACS versions. If there was a way to break a workflow, she surely found a way to do that :-) ...don't get me wrong, I really liked the way she revealed bugs I then reported to vendors so other users did not stumble on them. ...unfortunately many issues and bugs were often hard-coded or never fixed although I was a nitpick and a pain in the * for those vendors...

Are you using iCloud Photos, with Optimize iPhone Storage turned on?

If so, iCloud will contain full-size copies of your photos … but the phone might be storing lower-resolution, local, space-saving copies of some or all of them.

Strange.

Are you seeing these small photos on the phone itself, or on some other device?

If on some other device, how are they being transferred?

Richard.Taylor wrote: iPhone Photos doesn't really work like that

I felt bad that I just left it at that. The thing is, the pictures you're trying to get don't even exist anywhere in the phone-- there's no way treating the phone like a drive can work. The picture files are created by Photos in the process of export-- they weren't there before. Photos uses the Original picture file and adds the information from its database where it has recorded the filename, any edits, comments, crops, face IDs, and so on. Then it makes a file that can be exported. It does keep thumbnails versions and preview copies for quick scanning, but the actual image doesn't exist as a file until it's exported. So to get the pictures, you need to use an app like iTunes or the Apple Devices App or whatever Microsoft says to tell Photos to make the file.

You probably got the Preview versions that I had mentioned, which are smaller than what Photos can make, but larger than thumbnails. The thing about trying do what you had been doing is that it has never been supported, and there's no telling what you will get. There are some examples here from the Photos app:

Should you use Drag & Drop in Photos" - Apple Community

I'm not sure why you object to using the actual supported methods. Surely it makes sense…