Blurring thumbnails on Xiaomi: 7 reasons and step-by-step instructions for fixing

Introduction: Why are Xiaomi miniatures becoming fuzzy?

Do you open a gallery on your Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 or POCO X5 Pro, and instead of clear previews, blurred squares? Or do you see photos on Telegram as pixels? This is a common problem faced by owners of Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO smartphones. The blurring of thumbnails (previews) can manifest itself in different scenarios, from the system gallery to third-party messengers, and the reasons for it are far from obvious.

In this article, we’ll look at 7 key causes of thumbnail blur, from simple caching errors to hardware limitations of a MediaTek Helio or Snapdragon processor. You’ll learn how to diagnose a problem, what MIUI settings affect preview quality, and what to do if blurring only appears in specific applications (like WhatsApp or Viber), and we’ll give step-by-step instructions for each of the reasons, from cleaning the cache to manually changing the developer’s settings.

Important: If you use a smartphone based on MIUI 14 or later, some of the solutions may require additional actions due to changes in memory management policy.

1.Cash galleries and media storage: why cleaning doesn't always help

The most common reason for thumbnail blurs is a damaged cache from the Google Photos (MIUI Gallery) or com.android.providers.media. Cache is a temporary file that is created to quickly display previews. If it gets damaged (for example, due to a sudden power outage or a MIUI malfunction), the thumbnails start to appear in low resolution or disappear altogether.

However, simply cleaning the cache through Settings → Applications doesn’t always help, because MIUI uses two layers of caching:

• 📁 Local cache of the application (cleaned manually)
• 🖥️ System Media Cache (Stored in a Folder) /data/media/ and requires a reset of the service)

To completely reset the thumbnail cache:

1. Open Settings → Applications → Application Management.
2. Find the Gallery (or Google Photos) and select Storage → Clear the cache.
3. Restart the phone – it will force you to update the system media cache.
4. If the blur is still there, delete the.thumbnails folder at the root of the internal memory (you will need Root rights or a file manager with access to hidden files).

⚠️ Note: Deleting the.thumbnails folder will temporarily disappear all previews in the gallery, and they will recover automatically the next time you open the photos, but the process can take up to 10-15 minutes.

Optimization of MIUI: When the system itself degrades quality

MIUI aggressively optimizes media to save battery life and RAM, one of which is automatic compression of thumbnails in the background, especially on low-end models (Redmi 10A, POCO M4 Pro) with low RAM (3-4 GB), where the system forcibly reduces the resolution of previews to save resources.

Check if this optimization is included, you can:

1. Go to Settings → Special features → Visual adjustments.
2. Scroll down and find the option Optimize thumbnails (in some versions of MIUI it is hidden – see spoiler below).
3. Turn off the slider if it is active.

Another culprit is Adaptive Brightness, which in MIUI 13/14 can affect image rendering. If thumbnails only blur at a certain level of screen brightness, try:

• 🌞 Turn off adaptive brightness in Settings → Display.
• 🔄 Reboot your phone after the changes.

💡

If the thumbnails are blurred after optimizing, check the energy saving settings for the Gallery app. In Settings → Battery → Application Selection, set the "No Limits" mode for it.

3.CPU issues: why MediaTek is blurring previews more than Snapdragon

Owners of Xiaomi smartphones based on MediaTek Helio G processors (such as the Redmi Note 11 or POCO M5) are more likely to experience thumbnail blur than users of devices on Snapdragon. The reason is the hardware acceleration of image decoding. MediaTek chips use less powerful Mali-G graphics cores, which when you scroll through a gallery with hundreds of photos, automatically reduce the quality of previews.

Check whether the processor affects the blur, you can:

1. Install a third-party gallery (such as Simple Gallery or QuickPic).
2. Compare the quality of the miniatures in it and in the standard MIUI Gallery.
3. If the third-party gallery previews are clear, the problem is optimizing MIUI for your processor.

Solutions for MediaTek:

• 🔧 Turn off hardware acceleration in the developer settings: Activate Developer Mode (7 times click on Version) MIUI In Settings → About the phone. Go to Settings. → Additionally. → For developers, find the hardware overlays and activate it.

Settings → Battery → Memory Management

Light.

💡

If your smartphone is on MediaTek, the thumbnail blur may be due to overheating of the processor. Check the temperature in the CPU Monitor app - if it is above 50°C, let the phone cool down.

4. Blurrency in messengers: Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber

If thumbnails are blurred only in instant messengers (Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber), the problem lies in the settings of the applications themselves or in conflict with MIUI Optimization (Xiaomi optimization service).

• 📱 Telegram: App by default compresses preview to save traffic.To disable this: Open Telegram Settings → Data and memory. In the Quality of uploaded photos, select Never compress. Restart the application.

WhatsApp:

Adaptive storage

Settings → Storage → Storage Management

Viber:

Data savings

A common problem for all messengers on MIUI is background optimization, which can force applications to close, preventing them from downloading high-quality previews, to fix this:

Turn off data savings in the application |

Add messenger to battery optimization exceptions (Settings → Battery → Applications selection)|

Clear the messenger cache in Settings → Applications |

Reinstall the application if the blur is left-->

⚠️ Attention: B MIUI 14 has a Deep Clean feature that can delete messenger cache, including thumbnails. Turn it off in Settings → Memory. → Deep cleaning.

5.A damaged file system: When a problem is deeper than a cache

If neither cleaning the cache nor disabling optimizations helped, the cause may lie in file system damage (for example, after improper extraction). SD-a card or a file recording failure, which causes MIUI cannot correctly generate previews, and instead blurred squares or grey icons are displayed.

Signs of file system damage:

• 🔍 Miniatures are blurred only for files on SD-map.
• 📂 Some photos don't open or open with artifacts.
• 🔄 After the phone restarts, previews are temporarily restored, but then blurred again.

If the blurring only appears for files copied from PCs or other devices, the problem may be incompatibility of file encoding. Try renaming files by removing Cyrillic characters or spaces from the titles.

6 MIUI Updates: When New Firmware Breaks Miniatures

After the MIUI update (especially the larger ones, from 12 to 13 or 13 to 14), many users experience thumbnail blurs, due to changes in the media provider (the service responsible for generating previews), and newer versions of MIUI use a different compression algorithm that can conflict with old cache files.

How to fix it:

• 🔄 Reset Gallery settings: in Settings → Annexes → gallery → Storage click Reset settings (does not delete files, only resets display settings).
• 📥 Reverse to the old version MIUI: If the problem has appeared after the update, you can temporarily return to the previous firmware through Fastboot (instruction below).
• 🛠️ Manual editing of the configuration file: for power users, change the parameter ro.media.dec.jpeg.memcap in the build.prop file (Root required).