iPhone 8 | iOS 12.4 - photos.app gives error “ There was an error saving this photo, please try again later.” when I tap save/done after editing an image!

I have an iPhone 8 in perfect condition that was given to me second hand by my aunt as a Birthday gift a year or two ago and it currently has iOS 12.4 (don’t recommend me to update to iOS 13 right now, I understand the updated firmware is helpful on several fronts but the issue I’m having has no relevance to the firmware as I’ve looked into that. My business requires a couple apps not yet updated for iOS 13 and once they are I’ll be upgrading then.)

I am a semi-professional photographer, astrophotographer, photo editor, designer (of digitally manipulated photographic artwork, and graphical) among many other things and thus I have nearly ever Camera photo/video app available, as well as a plethora of photo & video editing apps, but I often make use of of Apple’s stock Photos.app and it’s built in editor, whenever I just need to make a quick crop or simple edit, as well as mark up annotations, and editing Portrait photos, and I find myself using as often if not more than my 3rd party apps, but recently I noticed when trying to save an image I cropped that the loading wheel spun for a few seconds before an alert popped up saying “There was an error saving this photo. Please try again later.”

Now this has gone on now for over a month as I attempted to troubleshoot the problem myself prior to asking for help in case it was a “here’s your sign” type of issue but this appears to be pretty serious, so I have no choice but to ask for help (posting here and on reddit).

As far as troubleshooting ❔, I of course immediately double tapped the home button and cleared all open apps ⛔️, restarted 🔄 my iPhone 8 📱, deleted as much unnecessary files 🗃, apps 🛠 and photos/videos 🎞 I possibly could, and currently I have iCloud photo library on 🔛, and Optimize iPhone Storage on 🔛 so as to save as much storage as possible as I have the smallest iPhone 8 size of 64gb.

This error has become quite problematic and bothersome, requiring me to take a photo/select a photo and then open it in a 3rd party photo editor like DarkRoom, Photoshop Express, Light X and so on to edit and save such edits, which takes much more time especially for quick and trivial edits like cropping or small mark up changes, and this affects my work.

On a side note, YES I have seen a previous Apple Community discussion nearly identical to this one, but there was never a definitive answer although several assumptions, which were suggested by fellow users here, and although Apple staff aren’t required to provide official responses to users posts (as per the community guidelines), there was not even one official answer. I’m hoping to get the right answer so as to set it as the most helpful or correct answer and close this case so future users having the issue and are troubleshooting can easily find this post via a Google query.

Thank you 🙏🏻 all so much for taking the time to read this post and I hope 🤞🏻 to get the fix for this asap!