You just nailed the shot. Maybe you spent the last hour dialing in the lighting for a cinematic, DSLR-style men’s fashion portrait, or perhaps you captured an incredibly crisp 8K video of a motorcycle ride. You open your iPhone gallery, hit the share button to AirDrop it to your Mac or text it to a client, and your phone just completely shuts you down.
“There Was an Error While Preparing to Share. Please try again later.”
Infuriating, right? You try tapping it again. Nothing. You restart your phone. Still nothing.
This specific iOS error has been haunting users for years. It doesn’t matter if you are rocking an older device or the absolute newest Pro Max; Apple’s ecosystem sometimes trips over its own shoelaces when handling high-quality media files.
The good news? Your file is not corrupted, and your hardware is totally fine. It usually boils down to a silent background setting, a weird metadata glitch, or an iCloud traffic jam. Here is exactly how to fix the sharing error right now so you can get your files moving again.
The Low Power Mode Trap
Look up at your battery icon. Is it yellow? There is your culprit.
Low Power Mode is fantastic for keeping your phone alive during a long transit commute, but it acts like a ruthless bouncer for background processes. To save juice, iOS aggressively pauses iCloud syncing, heavy file processing, and background rendering. If you are trying to share a massive, photorealistic image or a heavy video file, Low Power Mode simply won’t allocate the processor power to prepare it.
Go to Settings > Battery and toggle Low Power Mode off. Give the phone about thirty seconds to wake its background processes back up, and try sharing the photo again.
The iCloud “Optimize Storage” Limbo
If you have thousands of photos in your camera roll, you probably use the “Optimize iPhone Storage” feature. It is a brilliant trick for saving physical space—it keeps a blurry, low-resolution thumbnail on your local device and leaves the heavy, original file up in the cloud.
But when you hit the share button, your phone has to urgently download that massive original file from Apple’s servers before it can package it into a text or an AirDrop. If your Wi-Fi drops for even a microsecond, or if Apple’s servers hiccup, the download stalls out and throws the “Preparing to Share” error.
You have to manually kickstart the download. Open Settings, tap your Name at the very top, go to iCloud, and then Photos. Temporarily switch the checkmark from “Optimize iPhone Storage” to “Download and Keep Originals.” You do not have to leave it like this forever, but toggling this setting forces the server connection to wake up. Once the photo fully downloads to your local storage, it will share perfectly.
The HDR and Live Photo Glitch
Sometimes the file itself is just too complex for the app you are trying to push it through.
If you are shooting in high-quality HDR, or if the image is an active Live Photo, the embedded metadata can completely freak out third-party apps and even AirDrop. When iOS tries to convert that complex file into a standard, shareable format, the processor hangs.
There is a weird, but incredibly effective workaround for this:
Open the stubborn photo or video.
Tap Edit in the top right corner.
Don’t actually change the color or crop. Just let the edit menu load. If you previously made tweaks to the lighting, hit Revert to Original.
If it is a Live Photo, tap the little yellow “Live” icon at the top to turn the motion off.
Hit Done.
By stripping away the active Live element or temporarily reverting the edits, you simplify the file structure. Try sharing it now. It almost always works on the first try.
The Cellular Data Blockade
Are you standing outside, far away from a stable Wi-Fi router?
By default, iOS is incredibly protective of your cellular data plan. Even if you are paying for an unlimited 5G plan, the Photos app might be internally restricted from using cellular data to fetch high-res files from iCloud. The phone is literally waiting until you get home to a router before it allows the file to be processed for sharing.
Go to Settings > Photos > Cellular Data. Make sure the toggle is flipped on. If your phone was pausing the image processing, flipping this switch gives it permission to just use the local cell towers and finish the job.
Apple’s ecosystem is normally flawless, but when you are dealing with massive, high-fidelity files, you occasionally have to manually push the software over the finish line.
