Why social media photos look blurry, and how to fix them

Every platform stores and delivers huge numbers of images, so it reduces them. Two things happen. First, the photo is resized to the largest size the app displays; Instagram's help centre, for example, says feed photos are kept at a width of up to 1080 pixels. Second, the photo is saved again as a JPEG at a quality the platform chooses, which removes fine detail and can add visible blocks.

One round of this is usually fine. The damage builds up when a photo is shared several times: sent in a chat, saved, posted to a story, screenshotted, reposted. Each step resizes and recompresses what the last step left. The result is the soft, blocky, smeared look people call blurry.

Chat apps are a special case, with their own settings and their own kind of damage. Our page on fixing WhatsApp photo quality covers them in detail.

Zoom to 100 % on a computer and look at three places: a flat area such as sky or a wall, a sharp edge such as a jawline, and a detailed area such as hair or leaves.

• Square blocks in flat areas and colour bleeding along edges: JPEG compression.
• Fuzzy rings or dots around edges: ringing, another compression artefact.
• Everything soft but clean, with no blocks: the photo was resized down and is now shown larger.
• Speckled grain and colour blotches, mostly in shadows: the photo was taken in low light. That happened in the camera, not the app.
• Detail smeared in one direction: motion blur, which no faithful tool can reliably undo.

For a photo that is visibly damaged by compression or low-light grain, use Enhance. It removes noise and compression damage, adds natural fine texture where the photo had lost it, and keeps the original size. If the photo is already clean, Enhance leaves it essentially as it is.

For a clean photo that is simply too small, such as an old avatar or a photo saved at a few hundred pixels, use Upscale 4×. For a photo that is a reasonable size and only a little soft, Enhance is enough: it keeps the size and repairs mild softness along with noise and compression.

When a photo is both damaged and small, run Enhance first and upscale the result. Upscaling first would enlarge the blocks and grain too.

The best fix is to keep a good copy in the first place. Share from the original file on your phone, not from a saved or downloaded copy, and ask friends and family to do the same.

When you post to Instagram, upload a photo at least 1080 pixels wide with an aspect ratio between 1.91:1 and 4:5. Instagram's help centre says this keeps it at the best resolution it supports; anything outside that range is cropped. For YouTube thumbnails, the help centre recommends 3840 x 2160 pixels with a minimum width of 640 and a 16:9 ratio.

Post a photo once from the file instead of resharing a shared copy. Every reshare is another round of compression.

Start with the copy that has been shared the fewest times, and never a screenshot if the image itself is available. Upload it, pick the model that matches the damage, and compare the result with the original at the same display size. Look at faces, hair and edges.

The free plan gives you 3 free credits a day with no sign-up and no card. Free results carry a watermark, so they are for checking whether a photo can be saved. Paid plans remove the watermark: Pro has 200 credits a month for $9.99 and Pro+ has 500 for $19.99.

Compression throws information away. When a face is only a few dozen pixels wide and heavily compressed, the details that made it recognisable are gone. Some apps generate a sharp new face in that situation; PhotoRescue does not, because a generated face would not be the real person. Strong motion blur and badly out-of-focus shots are also beyond what a faithful tool can fix.

Text in a shared image follows the same rule. Readable text is kept, but text that compression made unreadable stays unreadable.