Storage amount for Photos significantly under reported.

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Level 1

8 points

Storage amount for Photos significantly under reported.

I am getting inaccurate numbers from General > iPad Storage as well as General > About > Available.

I have an iPad Pro (10.5 inch) running SV 13.6.1. See General - About attached.

All of the numbers there are correct except that Available should be ~345 GB. As you can see I am a heavy Photo/video user. When I query General > iPad Storage i get the following:

If I quickly go to Photos and then back I can get a display that correctly shows the magnitude of the Photos but with an incorrect total as below:

or possibly get the Photos line item total to be correct as below:

I don't know why the differences, but I suspect it has something to do with how large my Photo total is...they just can't believe it is 168.64 GB so they factor it down to 1.64 GB.

My concern, other than the number just isn't correct, is that if I ever get into a real marginal storage situation no action will be taken because it isn't recognized.

Any insights?

[Image Edited by Moderator to Remove Serial Number]

iPad Pro 10.5-inch, Wi-Fi

Posted on Aug 29, 2020 10:48 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

karina184

Community Specialist

Aug 30, 2020 11:44 AM in response to Xancramath

Hi Xancramath,

Thanks for reaching out through Apple Support Communities for help with Photos on your iPad Pro! Rest assured, we're glad to get to the bottom of this with you, and ensure you've got plenty of available storage space on your device.

Do you have iCloud Photos enabled on your device? If so, let's verify if the option to "Optimize iPad Storage" is enabled. This option can be found under Settings > Photos.

If "Optimize iPad Storage" is enabled, this feature will keep the full resolution versions of photos and videos stored in iCloud, and save storage space on your iPad by accessing them only when needed, such as when you tap on a thumbnail to make it larger.

To ensure your iPad has your entire library of photos and videos downloaded in their full resolution, tap on the option to "Download and Keep Originals."

This will begin the process of downloading all full resolution versions to your device. Here's a guide with more information about this:

Set up and use iCloud Photos

It's important to note that this process may take some time to complete, and may pause and resume automatically as your device is used.

If you don't use iCloud Photos, please let us know if you've had a chance to restart your device since noticing this behavior? Was your iPad recently restored from a backup?

Take care!

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Answer 2

Xancramath Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 30, 2020 5:46 PM in response to karina184

I did as suggested and selected "Download and Keep Originals" so now the storage usage is correct.

The change was immediate so it did not have to download the full size images. Since having the full size images be on my iPad is my intention this is good. I would suggest that the incorrect reporting when not using this setting is still a problem as is the under reporting of the size occupied by APPS and Other.

Thanks for the solution to my reporting problem...sorry there is still a bug. ;-)

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Answer 3

i_rina

Community Specialist

Aug 31, 2020 5:39 AM in response to Xancramath

Hi again Xancramath,

We're glad to hear it's resolved the behavior for you!

We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. It appears that when the option to Optimize iPad Storage was selected, your iPad may have actually had all full resolution photos and videos downloaded into storage, as there was so much available space on your device.

Essentially, there was no storage optimization needed. However, as your iPad could intelligently and automatically optimize those full resolution items if needed, they weren't shown as occupying storage space. The storage being used by those items was technically available for other data, so the totals reflected that they weren't occupying storage space.

We appreciate you bringing the unexpected behavior of the storage graph to our attention!

Have a great day!

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Storage amount for Photos significantly under reported.

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