Iphone photos and Icloud Drive Storage Dilemma

OK, I see! Storage in Files is completely separate from the Photos app. Unlike in Photos, if you put a picture into two different albums in Files, then those take up twice the space. And "Optimize Storage" has no effect. While Photos will show those pictures, they are not in the Photos domain.

For my pictures, I use Photos synced with iCloud to organize and show them on my iPad, iPhone, and Mac. I keep the full sized images (Optimize turned off) on my Mac, and I also have backup drives that hold copies of the pictures, just in case something goes wrong. I edit and organize pictures in Photos on my Mac. That organization is mirrored in iCloud. On my iPhone and iPad, I have "Optimize" turned on, and I can see all the pictures organized into albums just like I've done them on my Mac.

I actually have more than one Photos Library on my Mac, and I put "favorites" that I want to see and show off in a special Library (called Favorites.photoslibrary) that is the one that I sync with iCloud and my iThings. Other people with lots of pictures do this, but most people just have one Library.

First, an album isn't a collection of pictures-- it's a list of pictures that you'd like to see together. So an image can appear in 3 albums, but there's really only one picture taking up space-- it's just listed on three different album lists.

Duplicates do sneak in, and they should be listed in the Duplicates folder. Merging those will save a bit of space.

When you say, "I have stored many of these photos in my iCloud Drive," do you mean that you have iCloud turned on "iCloud Photos" in Settings>Photos on your phone? If that's what you've done, then you can check "Optimize iPhone Storage" and it will save maybe 80% of the space you pictures use.

iCloud Photos is a syncing service (not a backup), and organizing pictures into albums at iCloud/Photos will make the same albums appear on the iPhone organized in the same way. So iCloud Photos doesn't "save many" of your pictures; it makes a (more or less) exact copy of the Photos on your phone, keeping all of them on iCloud."Optimize Storage" keeps smaller version on your phone to save space, while allowing you to call up the full sized version as needed.

Let us know how this goes...