Unfortunately iPhone cameras are garbage for the past like, 5 years now. The processing like you mentioned is way too aggressive, but also, the focal distance is way too far to get good photos of anything up close unless you use macro mode which can make things look kind of wonky in my experience. I had an Xs and got the 14 pro last October and it’s funny because the main selling feature besides dynamic island is the cameras, but in actual use, they suck and are worse than my Xs. Honestly my iPhone 7 camera was fine.

Will airdrop allow me to keep my folder organization? And also, if I airdrop photos to the iPhone, then plug it in to the mac to import photos I took, won’t it also show all the airdropped photos (which would already be in the mac photos library)?

It annoys me even more because i just spent several months organizing 50k photos I had going back to 2012 from different drives and cloud services and finally got them all sorted down to 8,000 keepers and they are mostly in folders from certain times in my life or certain events/holidays. Losing all that would be honestly devastating at this point since I spent so much time on it.

It seems like it’s a leftover limitation from the iPod photo/iPod video days, or early ios when 8gb was what most people had. I suppose now they just expect me to use iCloud but it’s not like modern devices can’t handle the larger files, it just refuses to actually sync them.

Do you use a screen protector? Some of those have little mesh grilles like this.