Photos taking up too much GB even after I upload my photos to Icloud

I'm having the exact same issue. I uploaded about 70GB of photos. It's been over 48 hours now, and still there is 70GB of photos on my harddrive. I have optimise storage on.

Just wait a bit for the "optimize Storage" option to have any effect.

Photos will not remove photos that have been downloaded from iCloud needlessly, only when you need storage for other purposes.

When you fill your iPhone with other data will Photos remove more and more originals and replace them with smaller, optimized versions. You cannot get the photos off the iPhone completely. As an estimate - you can expect the optimization to reduce the amount of local storage for your photos on the iPhone down to 10% to 20% of the size in iCloud. For example, if your photos are taking up 500GB in iCloud, the optimized versions will still need 50GB to 100GB on your iPhone. How much storage are your photos taking up in iCloud?

Has the upload to iCloud already finished, or is the iPhone still uploading?

What you need to know is that iCloud Library is not an off-device backup storage facility. It's a syncing feature so that all devices signed into the same iCloud ID and use iCloud Photos will have the same photos in their library. Any operation on a device, i.e. addition or deletion (even if by accident) of a photo will be duplicated on all devices using that iCloud Library.

Any photo in the iCloud library is on each device. You could enable "Optimize Mac Storage" on your device so that when your device's storage reaches a certain level all new photos will be optimized, i.e. reduced in size, with the full sized version in the iCloud Library. If you want to use an optimized photo for any reason you will have to download the full sized original before it can be used.

If you want to backup your library you can do so to iCloud (on iPhones and iPads) or to a computer.

For iPhones and iPads there are portable devices which can connect to the iPhones/iPads and with the software included download photos and documents from your mobile device to the portable device. One such device is called ThePhotoStick.

Using such a device you can then delete the photos, after confirming a successful download, from your iPhone/iPad to free up space on it. BUT NOT WITH ICLOUD LIBRARY!

Yeah, you just need to go to your settings for photos. You have the option of keeping the originals on your device. Or not! If you optimize storage, it will only save them on the cloud. So you can access them from any Apple device you’re signed into that way, but you don’t have to keep them on any certain device unless you want to. Hope that helps.

Tomfffffnz wrote: I'm having the exact same issue. I uploaded about 70GB of photos. It's been over 48 hours now, and still there is 70GB of photos on my harddrive. I have optimise storage on.

Please re-read léonie's post.

When a picture is "optimized," then there must be a small delay before you can edit or zoom in on the picture. So "Optimize" reduces the storage used by Photos only when the iPhone's other processes need it, and then only by the amount that they need.

Optimize your photo storage. Settings > photos. That will keep originals in the cloud and optimized pictures on your device.