iPhone 13 photos storage doubled after upgrading from iPhone 10

Hi All,

I spent most of my evening trying to figure this out. I believe photos is taking up so much storage because with the newer phones the “my photos and shared with you” is automatically turned on. You will see this in your photo album, upper right corner with the 3 dots. This stores all photo attachments from iMessage in your photos storage. To turn this off and avoid your phone automatically saving and storing these photos you go to settings > messages > shared with you > toggle off photos

This seemed to have worked for me and hopefully helps you too!

I figured it out! Ok I have the new iPhone 13 Pro and transferred my data from my iPhone X & had the same problem with all my storage being used up by photos. I read every blog I could & one person mentioned turning off “Live Text” but I didn’t really understand what he meant. So I did some digging around and figured out what to do.

Anyway, I did the software upgrade to 15.1 then did this: go to Settings, Camera & unclick “Show Detected Text”. Then power your phone off. When you restart it, all should be well 😄

Same thing happened to me and I think I have a solution. You need to turn off “Live Text” in Settings, then reset phone and do Quick Start ios transfer of original phone to new phone. After Quick Start ios transfer check Settings again to turn off “Live Text”. After confirming live text is set to be off, you may open photo app. This worked for my new iPhone 13. When I bought my new iPhone 13 it initially looked like all my photos transferred fine and data size was same as my old phone’s photos which was 5.6 GB. But after exploring my phone and looking at my photos and touching a photo in a way that activated the “Live Text” ability to highlight text in a photo, I soon noticed my phone’s photos now showed as 11.9 GB even though there were no new photos. This meant my photos data storage size doubled. The Live Text attribute was automatically applied to all photos without giving me any kind of warning that activating the live text feature would double the data storage for the Photos App. I have not discovered a way to undo Live Text data size change, however I did discover that doing a factory reset of my new phone and transfer my old phone data to the new phone again but this time making sure to turn off Live Text by going to Settings, click on General, click on Language & Region, and turn off “Live Text”, then open photos app and all my data sizes will stay the same as my old phone. Live Text works only on iPhones XS, XR, 11, 12, and 13 with iOS 15 installed. For people who have iPhones XS, XR, 11, and 12 i suggest immediately after doing the iOS 15 update to turn off “Live Text” in Settings prior to opening any photos unless youre okay with doubling the data size. If you already activated live text that doubled your data size and you want to “undo it”, try Restoring iPhone From Backup so all your old photos and settings are returned to normal, then do update and immediately turn off “Live Text” in Settings. Good luck and best wishes.

I phoned Apple support who talked me through re-install from iCloud.

My photo storage reduced from 85gb to 4gb on my iPhone 13 but kept iCloud storage at high gb.

4gb is probably thumbprints

Hi Placerita Ron,

We see that our Photo library is taking up more space on your device. You can use optimize storage in iCloud photos. Use the steps under "If you need more device storage" in Set up and use iCloud Photos. If you need further assistance click here to Get Support.

Take care!

If you have an itunes backup file from your old phone you can “Restore From Backup” onto the new phone. Sorry this method may be too late for you to use since so much time has passed but hopefully it helps others who may experience this data doubling and can fix it in time. Please remember that restoring from backup means the old data will fully replace all recent data on your phone so save any recent data separately if youre wanting to keep it prior to doing the restore.

Phone Apple Support.

Optimizing photos in iCloud does not reduce storage space used after data is transferred. My 19g of photos grew to 35g going from X to 13! I have the same issue after transferring data via iCloud and also phone-to-phone data transfer. Both ways have the same results. I believe Apple software is adding pixels to older X image data. Hence the larger photo data usage.

This response is not helpful. I also noticed the same thing. My iPhone 13, that I just activated, is also using double the amount of photo storage GB than my XR. It lists same amount of pictures but the space is eating up my phone storage where is was not with the XR. There has got to be a solution or people will start sending their iPhone 13’s back. Absolutely no reason the photo storage should increase when it’s the same number of photos from one phone to the other. Please find a solution that doesn’t involve paying for more iCloud when we were doing just fine with our old phones.

My tech said he’s coming across this complaint more frequently every time there’s a new iPhone out.

We phoned Apple helpline who advised I turn off iCloud backup/ delete all photos from new iPhone then reinstall from iCloud to see if all my photos re-installed from iCloud with lower storage BUT I WAS NOT WILLING TO RISK LOSING ALL MY PHOTOS!

You see if you delete some photos from iPhone, they immediately auto-delete from iCloud.

But the next time I upgrade iPhones (which may be sooner than I hoped) I will wait until I hear this photo storage doubling issue has been sorted by Apple.

Apple helpline also asked if I still had my old iPhone XS which unfortunately I’d reset to factory settings and gave away to family member (before I realised the photo storage issue).

This was because the auto-transfer from XS to 13 was so easy.

I await for an explanation or solution with interest.

did you find a solution or is this just something we have to deal with? I almost maxxed out my new phone

Did not upgrade my X, just used update all apps in App Store and then the storage of my photos tripled in 3 minutes! Went from taking 68 gb to 204 gb! Essentially it was all of the remaining storage on my phone.

Kept getting message ‘not enough space to update’ for apps with a few hundred mb update. System was using 165 gb during the app updates! Have screenshots.

I unfortunately have this same issue.

iPhone XR -> iPhone 13 using iPhone -> iPhone transfer of my data on iOS 15.1.1

My icloud storage now is nearly maxed purely because of photos which were not taking up anywhere near as much space previously.

I tried the above option of Settings -> Camera -> Disable Show Detected Text, restarted my iPhone but the iCloud photo storage hasn’t reduced.

I then tried a manual iCloud backup in case that would help but still the same.

Also tried disabling Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Live Text but that didn’t help either.

Any ideas on how I get the iCloud stored photos to reduce, I’m guessing above isn’t helping as the iCloud stored photos possibly already have the change saved on them?

TKHiowell, thank you so so much, this worked for me and you have saved me so much stress! I can’t thank you enough. I called Apple Supprt before finding this thread so many times and they couldn’t help. They even remoted in to my screen to help me but couldn’t it. They don’t know about this fix, someone should tell them! Thank you so much for sharing this!!! 💙😄

I tried those exact steps but to no effect. Curious if you did a complete restore of the phone and then preformed those steps without opening photos or did you do those steps after having the storage issue showing up?