iPhone 6 camera photos load up in grey

In an iPhone 6 running iOS 10.x when user took some photos and was able to view the thumbnail in camera roll. However when the user tapped  to open the photo, the photo flashed up for 1 second, and then its quickly replaced by a grey box. It seems that iphone camera roll greyed out and iphones photo got corrupt showing grey boxes in the picture.This is happening for every image taken with the iPhone Camera app (iPhoto) since then. I tried to restart my phone and it doesn't help. If you try to send the pictures across to any other iphone device still the receiver won’t be able to see your picture and it will be greyed out or black. Even When tried syncing the photos to my computer and they still show up as gray boxes on the computer.  The pictures appear in preview on Photos on my Mac but upon import are grey again. Restarting the iphone or even taking restoring from backup won’t seems to fix the issue.

Interestingly it has been observed by some users that if you try to take photos from some other app eg whatsapp the picture would come clear without any grey dots.  There are no official fix or statement given from Apple side to fix iphone photos greyed out issue.

How to recover grey photos on iphone

Step 1: Make some free space in the device

it is observed that most devices affected by the issue don’t much storage space left over, could be causing iphoto app to work inappropriately.

Maybe your device is out of storage space?

Settings → General -> Storage & iCloud Usage → Storage / Available

If you don’t have much space left in storage make sure to empty some gigs of space and do a hard reboot.

Now make sure you are at latest version of Apple iOS software version. First, upgrade to iOS 10.3.1  software by downloading it from, in Settings → General → Software Update.

Step 2: rebuild the iPhoto library:

·         Quit iPhoto if it is open.

·         Hold down the Command and Option keys on the keyboard.

·         Open iPhoto.

·         Keep the keys held down until you are prompted to rebuild the library.

·         A dialog will appear with rebuild options. Select the options you want to use.

·         Click Rebuild to begin the rebuild process. This may take a few minutes to complete.

·         Use these guidelines to determine which options to choose in the rebuild dialog:

·         Select the option(s) to rebuild thumbnails only if the thumbnails appear to be an issue (gray, blank, missing or mismatched).
Do a Hard reboot to your iphone at the end.