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Images taken on an iphone (iPhone 7, up to date) seem to store with normal file size (several MB). When connecting the phone through USB cable to a windows computer, some of the copied files/images have a giant file size. The lowest value is about 600MB, but some images can "grow" to 2 or even 3 GB.

When replicating the copy action, the same files are stored as it should (with their sizes like on the phone, being about 3-4 MB).

Looking back, it seems this has always been the issue since the phone was purchased (about 1 and a half year ago).

Update: It's a simple file transfer through explorer.

I've compared a normal images and a corrupted image properties, and nothing out of the ordinary except file size.

Read only attribute is not checked.

File size is checked through explorer on the phone (didn't found a way to do so on the phone).

Any suggestions what could cause this behavior? Let me know if I can provide extra information.

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    How are you copying: iTunes or Explorer? Have you looked at the properties of the bloated copy? There may be a clue there to what's going on.
    – AFH
    Commented Jan 21, 2019 at 14:59
  • Ate you checking the file size on the iPhone or on your computer after the transfer? How are you checking the file size? Are you seeing it actually say MB and GB or is it displayed in bytes or bits and you're converting it?
    – HazardousGlitch
    Commented Jan 21, 2019 at 15:23
  • @AFH Updated question
    – Terry
    Commented Jan 21, 2019 at 15:24
  • I can only guess that the iPhone is misreporting the file size. My only suggestion is to use something like Process Monitor to see the file requests made by Explorer. If you can reproduce the problem with a small file (eg a thumbnail), it will reduce the size of the logs you need to analyse. Compare copying the same file from the iPhone and from a USB disc, and look particularly at the open and close dialogues. I don't have an iPhone, but on an iPad3 with iOS9 I have not had file copy problems (though I mostly use Linux).
    – AFH
    Commented Jan 21, 2019 at 15:54
  • I think it's simply a MTP bug and not something SU will be able to solve for you. Often bloated files do not even contain data. Some reported, zipping files prior to transfer allows them to copy the files to PC.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Jul 17 at 0:03

1 Answer 1

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Before figuring out the exact cause, you need to know the actual amount of data transferred. It could be that the software interface between your PC and your iPhone are just showing miscalculated values. Try the following two methods:

  1. set up a tiny file server on your PC, e.g. FileZilla FTP server, or HFS (a very simple http file server), and use FTP clients or web browsers on your phone to upload images to them, watch for the file size.
  2. use resmon.exe (System Resource Monitor), or some third-party hacker tools like ProcessExplorer from SysInternals or ProcessHacker by Wen Jia Liu, and monitor system I/O delta size. The graphic curves automatically provided by these tools shall suffice.

In case you do find bulky uploads, you can keep the large files got in method 1 temporarily, and run binary file editors / hex-editors like UltraEdit, HxD on both the erroneous files and the correct files to see what extra data has been actually written to these bulky files.

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