iPhone 5 -- How to get higher-res photos??

[kendyluv]

After years of taking photos with my iPhones, I'm FINALLY getting around to actually getting some of them printed out.
But I'm finding that when I upload them into the photo sites, I'm getting messages that some of them are too low-quality for printing above 3x5 size!
I mean, I take 10 pictures on a hike, and 8 of them are too low quality.
How is this possible?

Can anyone tell me what the heck the difference is? And whether I can fix it -- or if the iPhone 6 is a good enough camera that I could count on printing good photos out as 5x7s?

Thank you!

 

[GregR]

The small physical size of the lens and sensor result in unsharp and noisy images compared with a regular camera of the same specs. It's likely that any pic taken in less than good lighting will not meet the quality of your printing service. It's a limitation of the small hardware making up the camera. Megapixels mean nothing in the context.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

The iPhone 6 does have a better camera, but your specific problem may be related to how you are using it. Or better said, how iOS attempts to improve picture quality in low-light situations. Basically, it "condenses" the pixel data compensate for low-light scenarios to improve the picture quality, but the resolution is cut in half as a consequence. Here's an article explaining it:
Your 8MP iPhone 5 may only give you 4MP photos (but it’s not broken) - SlashGear

I don't know that the iPhone 6 does anything differently here. I doubt it does (EDIT: I just experimented with my iPhone 5S and I couldn't replicate this behavior, so it may be specific to the iPhone 5). You may be able to avoid this by using a 3rd party camera app. Better yet, if you want high resolution photos for printing, use a decent DSLR camera. The iPhone has a great camera for what it is, but it will never beat what a good camera can do. No smartphone can.

 

[chas_m]

This is nonsense. I've had photos printed from my iPhone 4 and the look great. Something else is going on here.

 

[cwa107]

I agree with Chas, absolute nonsense. There is no reason why your photos wouldn't produce good printed images even up to 8x10, let alone 3.5x5.

Are you uploading these images through a 3rd party hosting service, or directly from your iPhone?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

In light of the objections of the others, I decided to look up what the actual minimum recommended resolution is for 5x7 prints. The recommendation may vary from one service to the next, but here's a guide that does a great job of explaining it all:
Printing images - what file size do you need? Resolution, pixel sizes and file sizes compared for print

In a nutshell, if you take Kodak's recommendations: "For a 5" x 7" print, the image resolution should be 1024 x 768 pixels minimum."

The resolution of the 8MP camera is 3264x2448. In low light mode, the resolution should be 2240x1680. See this chart:
Digital Camera Resolution

Even if the resolution of your photos is halved by the low light mode, you are still well within Kodak's recommendations, which I would think are pretty much the standard. So, you clearly have something else going on here. Just how did you upload these photos? Did you pull them from iPhoto? Did you export them and use a setting that reduces the resolution? Did you use the native Camera app to take the photos, or some other app that can acquire/save at alternate resolutions?