An Apple iPhone 17 Camera Glitch Is Wrecking Photos, Fix Inbound

It’s iPhone season and Apple has delivered some nice upgrades to its entire lineup of phones, alongside iOS 26, while adding a new device to the family with the thinner and lighter iPhone Air. As expected, the bevy of upgrades include a new set of improved cameras across the board, but one early reviewer has spotted a glitch while taking photos, and the Cupertino company now says it will be addressing the bug with a future update.

Henry T. Casey of CNN Underscored was putting the iPhone Air, iPhone Pro and Pro Max through their paces when he noticed an anomaly over the course of a week and a thousand photos. While taking some pictures at a concert, “one out of every 10 or so photos taken on the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro Max have small blacked-out portions, including boxes and parts of white squiggles from the big LED board behind the band.”


After reaching out to Apple about the strange behavior of iPhone 17 cameras, the company said that it “can happen in very rare cases when an LED light display is extremely bright and shining directly into the camera. Apple has identified a fix and will be releasing it in an upcoming software update.”

Since the camera systems on modern smartphones rely so heavily on computational photography to deliver the quality pictures customers expect, it’s not surprising to see a glitches like these pop up on occasion. The fact Apple releases a new version of iOS alongside their new devices also increases the probability that some gremlins in the code make an undesirable impact when devices are first launched.

Thankfully, this problem was spotted during the review phase of the devices and should be fixed with an update shortly after these shiny new iPhones begin to make their way out to customers at retail.