Why your photo looks blurry or pixelated after you upload it
4 minutes, updated 2026-11-09
The photo looked sharp on your phone and soft or blocky on the website. Usually nothing went wrong in transit; one of four things happened to it on the way.
1. Quality was spent on pixels the site never shows
If a 4000-pixel photo is squeezed under 50 KB at full size, the encoder has to lower quality until it is blocky. The same 50 KB spent on a 600-pixel photo gives a clean image, because the site displays it at a few hundred pixels anyway. Shrink first, then compress. The fit-to-size tool does this automatically, trading pixels for quality below a preferred quality level.
2. The site compressed it again
Many platforms re-encode every upload to their own size and quality. A file that was already compressed hard loses detail twice. Upload the best copy the site accepts: if there is no size limit, keep quality at 85 to 90 and let the site do its own compression once.
3. A small image is being shown large
A 200-pixel photo shown in a 400-pixel box, or on a phone screen with three device pixels per CSS pixel, is enlarged by the browser and looks soft. If the site has no size limit, upload at least twice the width it displays. If it demands a small exact size, the soft preview is expected and is not what the reviewer sees in their own records.
4. You started from a copy
Photos forwarded through chat apps, saved from social media or screenshotted are already reduced and recompressed. Compressing them again compounds the damage. Go back to the original file in the phone's gallery.
Quick diagnosis
| What you see | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Blocky squares, colour bands | Quality too low for the pixel size | Reduce pixels, raise quality |
| Soft everywhere, no blocks | Small image enlarged on screen | Upload more pixels if allowed |
| Sharp locally, soft on the site | The platform recompressed it | Upload higher quality, once |
| Soft before you even started | A chat or social media copy | Use the original file |