Photos taking up a lot of space
I have a little over 5000 photos and videos on my phone, yet they take up 125 GB of storage? Is this normal? I feel like like it’s taking way too much.
Question marked as
Have the videos and photos been taken with the iPhone?
You can save storage on the iPhone by setting the camera to use the High Efficiency format HEIC. The average HEIC image will use only half of the storage as the JPEG version. If you are not yet using HEIF consider to change the camera settings. Using HEIF or HEVC media on Apple devices - Apple Support
Images can also need a lot of storage, if you are using special formats, not just the videos. The portrait mode images need to store an additional depth map, the Live Photos an additional video clip with the animation.
if you are setting the format to RAW on your iPhone, your image files can take up to 22MB for a single RAW image. Just taking 5000 RAW files on an iPhone 15 Pro max can result in 110GB of additional storage.
The storage may also increase considerably, if you are using external editors to edit your images. Some external editors will save the the edited image as a Tiff file to preserve the quality, for example Luminar. For example, I just edited a HEIC image of 2MB in Luminar, and the edited version is a TIFF image with a size of 77MB. Photos is still showing the size as 2 MB, but on my Mac I can see the huge edited version by opening the library in PowerPhtoos.
To find the large files you may want to look at the size of the images and videos by looking at the sizes of the items in the Info, starting from the albums in the Media section of the list of albums on your iPhone.
