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User profile for user: Mika Rahkonen
Mika Rahkonen Author
User level: Level 1
11 points

Gigabytes of pics stuck in iphone 12 – despite uploading to iCloud

Got an iPhone 12 and restored it from an iCloud copy of my iPhone X.


Now there’s suddenly 4 Gb of pictures in my new phone – whereas all my pics were in iCloud and took zero bytes space on the old phone.


Now I’m wondering where these pics came from.

The space they take up seems to fluctuate – on any given moment it’s 4Gb and suddenly 2Gb and then back to 4Gb or so.


Phone has been connected to power overnight.

Phone is connected to wifi overnight.

Phone is not in low power mode.

I do have enough iCloud storage available (110G / 200G used)

Restarted iPhone a couple of times.

Turned iCloud photos off and on again

I have the latest iOS Software in both phones.


Any advice and / or help greatly appreciated.


Thanks!


iPhone 12, iOS 14

Posted on Nov 30, 2020 10:56 AM

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User profile for user: Lawrence Finch
Lawrence Finch
User level: Level 10
214,392 points

Posted on Nov 30, 2020 11:04 AM

To expand on the previous post, iCloud is a sync service, not an archiving service. It will keep content in sync between all devices logged in to iCloud, as well as at https://icloud.com. But any changes made on any device (add, delete, edit) will be replicated on all of the logged in devices. This applies to everything synced to iCloud, not just photos. So contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, etc all behave the same way.


So your options are to never use iCloud Photos from your phone, or to use an archiving service to save photos that you don’t want on your phone. Examples are Google Photos, Dropbox, box.com, shutterfly, Livedrive.com, Amazon Photos, etc.


Note that you CAN use Optimize Photos so the copies on your phone will be smaller, without affecting the full size images in iCloud.

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User profile for user: Lawrence Finch
Lawrence Finch
User level: Level 10
214,392 points

Nov 30, 2020 11:04 AM in response to Mika Rahkonen

To expand on the previous post, iCloud is a sync service, not an archiving service. It will keep content in sync between all devices logged in to iCloud, as well as at https://icloud.com. But any changes made on any device (add, delete, edit) will be replicated on all of the logged in devices. This applies to everything synced to iCloud, not just photos. So contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, etc all behave the same way.


So your options are to never use iCloud Photos from your phone, or to use an archiving service to save photos that you don’t want on your phone. Examples are Google Photos, Dropbox, box.com, shutterfly, Livedrive.com, Amazon Photos, etc.


Note that you CAN use Optimize Photos so the copies on your phone will be smaller, without affecting the full size images in iCloud.

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Gigabytes of pics stuck in iphone 12 – despite uploading to iCloud

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