Owners of budget and mid-budget smartphones like the Xiaomi Redmi 9 often encounter visual artifacts when scrolling through a gallery. Instead of clear images, the screen displays a porridge of colored spots that slowly turns into recognizable photos. This phenomenon, known as thumbnail blurring, is not a matrix defect, but rather indicates software limitations or memory buffer overflow.
Android, when it's mounted on a MIUI shell, tries to optimize the load on the processor by previewing low-quality previews. However, in some cases, this mechanism fails, and the user sees a protracted rendering process. Understanding the nature of this process is the first step to solving the problem.
In this article, we will discuss in detail the technical causes of artifacts, software cleaning methods and hidden settings that will help speed up the interface, and learn how to safely intervene in the system to achieve maximum responsiveness of the device without losing warranty.
Technical Causes of Artifacts
The main reason for blurring is the thumbnail caching mechanism in the operating system. When you open the gallery, Android doesn't download full versions of photos right away, as it would require a huge amount of RAM. Instead, a preview cache is created that stores smaller copies of images for quick display.
If the media database is damaged or overcrowded, the system will not work properly. The MediaTek Helio G80 processor installed in Redmi 9 may not have time to process requests for high-resolution decoding of images, especially if the number of images is in the thousands, as a result, the user sees blurred squares until the time of full rendering.
⚠️ Warning: Constant overflow of the thumbnail cache can lead to accelerated wear of the internal memory of the smartphone due to data overwriting cycles.
Also worth considering is the impact of third-party launchers and design themes. Some visual modifications to the MIUI interface conflict with the standard rendering mechanism, causing delays in rendering graphics. Disabling hardware acceleration in the developer settings sometimes exacerbates the situation, forcing the processor to do extra work.
Clearing cache and gallery data
The most effective and safest way to solve this problem is to force the cleaning of accumulated temporary files, which will not delete your personal photos, but will reset the display settings and force the system to regenerate the thumbnail database. First, you need to get into the application management menu.
Go to Settings → Applications → All Apps. In the list that opens, find the standard Gallery app. Click on it to open the detailed menu. Here you are interested in the Clean button located at the bottom of the screen.
☑️ Checking before cleaning
In the window that appears, select Clear the cache. If the problem persists, you can try a more radical method, Clean everything. After that, the gallery can run slowly on its first run until it creates new previews, but after a few minutes the lags should disappear.
- 📱 Open the smartphone settings through the gear.
- 🗑️ Find the application management section in the menu.
- 🖼️ Select a gallery and perform a cache reset.
- 🔄 Restart the device to apply changes.
Optimizing the Developer’s Settings
For advanced users who want to squeeze the maximum performance from Redmi 9, hidden menus of engineering settings are available. Activation of the developer mode allows you to manually control graphical acceleration and animations, which directly affects the speed of rendering thumbnails.
To activate the menu, go to Settings → About Phone and quickly click on MIUI seven times. Once the notification appears, go back to Advanced Settings → Developer.
A critical parameter is “Load Textures”, which in some firmware versions can be forced to shut down to save energy, which causes blurring.
Try changing the animation settings. Reducing the animation window, transition and animator scale to 0.5x will create the illusion of faster system operation, but do not turn off the animations completely, as this can disrupt visual navigation.
| Parameter | Recommended value | Impact on the system |
|---|---|---|
| Scale of animation | 0.5x | Accelerates interface response |
| Background of processes | No more than 2. | Frees up the working memory. |
| Hardware acceleration | Included. | Reduces the load on the CPU |
The Impact of Image and Media File Format
Modern smartphones support a variety of formats, but not all are equally well handled by budget processors.The HEIC format, used by default in many cameras, requires more computing resources to decode previews than the standard JPEG.
If your gallery mixes high-resolution photos (48 MP and above) and short 4K videos, the system takes time to index. Heavy files create a processing queue, and while the GPU handles one image, the rest are displayed in low quality.
Hidden file formats
Regular audits of the library are recommended, removing duplicates, blurred images and unnecessary screenshots will make it much easier for thumbnail algorithms to work, and using cloud services to store archives will also relieve internal memory.
- 📸 Avoid shooting in RAW editless.
- 🎞️ Convert old videos to lightweight format.
- ☁️ Move your archives to cloud storage.
Problems with memory card and storage
Using a microSD card as internal storage or photo space often causes lags: The speed of reading cheap memory cards is well below the speed of the built-in eMMC module in Redmi 9, which leads to delays in downloading previews.
If the gallery is set to display files from the map, the blur can last longer than usual. The fragmentation of the file system on an external medium also plays a negative role.
⚠️ Warning: Avoid storing more than 5,000 photos on a single low-speed memory card, this is guaranteed to lead to interface hangings.
Check the state of the drive. Overflowing memory (over 90% occupied) makes the system work in trottling mode, slowing down all I/O operations. Freeing up at least 5-10 GB of space can make a difference with the responsiveness of the gallery.
Alternative solutions and third-party software
If the standard MIUI gallery continues to malfunction even after all the settings, it makes sense to consider alternatives.The Google Play store offers a plethora of optimized apps that use their own caching algorithms and run faster.
Popular apps like Google Photos or QuickPic often do better with large libraries on weak devices, and they can take over the thumbnail display function while the system gallery is resting.
💡
Use Files by Google to find and remove duplicate photos, which often take up to 20% of the gallery space.
It’s also worth checking for system updates. Xiaomi engineers regularly release security and optimization patches for the Redmi 9 model. Newer versions of Android can fix the graphics accelerator driver errors.
- 📥 Install an alternative gallery from the Play Market.
- 🧹 Use cleaners to remove garbage files.
- 🆙 Check for updates MIUI customized.
- 🔍 Turn off the synchronization of heavy albums.