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The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
Dear All,
It's been more than a month since my photos stopped syncing with the iCloud. I still have about 140gb left space up there and the status says it is actually syncing (well, it's not). The pictures take now almost 40gb from my internal memory storage which does not allow me to use the phone properly. Anyone had this issue? Or any idea how to solve this problem? Looking forward to your answers.
G.
iPhone 12, iOS 16
How many photos are you having in total? How much storage are they using in iCloud?
You should expect your photos to be using some local storage on your iPhone, even if they are stored in iCloud Photos. Photos will keep smaller, optimized versions for browsing on your iPhone, so you can select and download them, when you want to view them. If all photos have been uploaded to iCloud, they will still need local on your iPhone - as a rule of thump at least 10% to 20% of what the photos and videos are needing in iCloud. Your photos may already have been uploaded completely to iCloud, if the status message is saying "syncing". If there were photos that still need uploading, you would be seeing "Uploading" in the status bar.
A photos library of 400GB in iCloud would need about 40GB on your iPhone. If you cannot afford that much storage for photos locally on the iPhone, try to keep less photos in iCloud - save the photos you do not need accessible on your device on external drives on a computer.
On your phone in Settings>Photos, do you have Optimize iPhone Storage checked? Checking that should save you 80% or more of your space, as léonie suggested.
So it takes 38gb in my phone storage and 50gb in the cloud. I tried to turn off syncing, more than 8 months of pictures disappeared from my phone but hardly any change in the phone memory (only 2gb). Most of the pictures are indeed already in the cloud. The problem is with the phone storage as it takes more than 50% of the entire space.
Yes, I do. Sorry, it is in Polish.
Any further ideas? Anyone?
Syncing photos with iCloud
