Photos app causing battery drain after iOS 18 Update

Hey everyone,

I came across this thread after searching for similar solutions to battery drain from my Photos app after upgrading to iOS18.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I contacted Apple support via a call and explained the situation and the actions I’ve already taken to fix this. So, I sent them screenshots and they asked to gather analytics from my phone. Which I allowed them to do remotely.

Their solution was to reset my phone (which doesn’t erase any data). This worked perfectly! My battery drain has vanished and I’m now able to use my phone for a full day as before without any drain.

Hope this helps you guys.

My solution was deleting the photos from the deleted album. Fixed. No more background activity.

It’s definitely the photo’s app. I’ve had things like background app refresh and location turned off for years. I have about five (non Apple) apps installed (no social media type) and I use my iPhone 15 Pro mostly for talk and text which never accounts for anything more than 5% of my battery, even on a heavy use day. Went from holding a 2da charge to charging twice a day after iOS 18. I noticed in Battery Heath that Photo’s was using 32% of my battery in the background which is incredibly alarming bc I don’t use Photo’s in that capacity, and for the fact that I have background refresh toggled off. Essentially, Apple has turned the utility app into their own social media app and it’s working as such. My solution was to turn cellular data off for Photo’s completely. (Settings > Apps> Photo’s > Cellular Data> toggle off) I did this two days ago and my battery is holding almost the same charge it did pre-update. As long as you connect to WiFi when needed, your photo’s will sync to iCloud. I don’t use the app much, but I don’t see any reason to have photo’s running on cellular. I hope this helps!

Side note: I do not connect my iPhone to WiFi on a regular basis. If you are constantly connected to WiFi, this fix likely won’t work for you as the app will continue to run in the background and there is no way to disable this function.

Same here! I tried iOS 18 twice and twice it burned up my battery with Photos app consuming 83% of my battery. I know it's a few days for the phone sometimes to "optimize" but I let it run for 5 days and it still consumed 80% of my battery. Downgraded to 17.7 last night and runs like a champ again!

17.7 is still signed,

remember that if you do not have backup made with 17, then you have to configure as a new phone, restore backup from 18 is not working.

But fortunately messages, photos and rest necessary stuff is synchronized.

I didn’t have backup with 17, but I restored and configured everything in a short time - no regrets.

[Edited by Moderator]

As FlyingChair suggests, it looks like not opening Photos after rebooting stops the app draining the battery. My iPhone 15 pro is only two months old and the issue only started after installing IOS 18.

Today I couldn’t get enough charge in the phone for it to stay powered up! Until I managed to switch it off and allow it to cool and charge for a bit.

According to apple help desk today, there are no software problems with my device; apparently it must be hardware. I’m not so sure about that.

Solution for me was to downgrade phone to ios17.7.

Phone again is work smooth, faster and without battery drain like it was on 18.0

I will not upgrade to 18 anymore :-)

Noticed this issue recently began for me as well. It seems to have gotten the worst last week, on Wednesday, which is I think when I updated to 18.0.1. Since then, my photos app has had 45 hours of background use. Over the full 10 days of battery history, the total background usage by photos is 59 hours. The highest day was yesterday, at nearly 14 hours of background activity! What is going on?! No wonder my battery is suddenly draining so fast. Seems to be the highest at night, when it's plugged in, so no battery "usage" but it runs in the background for hours consecutively, that can't be good for the battery, right? I am using an iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Same here on an iPhone 12 mini. Only solution I found is reboot the iPhone and not touch camera or photo app.

iOS 17.7 is still being signed by Apple as of last night when I reverted to it.

Yes this is happening to me too! I bought the new iPhone 16 pro max and to my surprise, the battery has been worse than my iPhone 13 Pro Max. Go check all of the settings and see that Photos app is running in the background for nearly 54 hours. Went and looked at my old phone prior to resetting it not happening then whenever I switched my wife to my old phone and had to update iOS 18 it’s now running in her background as well. KILLING BATTERY LIFE

Hello.

I have iPhone12 mini and I updated to ios18 week ago, from that time I see problem with battery drain.

Photos application has worked now almost 65h in background, even without connected power.

Battery now is discharging a lot faster in a day after update do ios18.

I have the exact same issue after updating my iPhone 13 to iOS 18 1,5 weeks ago and still after updating to 18.0.1 yesterday.

Photo app background activity 18,5 hours per day! Battery drains from 100% at 9am to 40% at 1pm with very low to no usage...

How to fix that problem???

PS: Reset and restoring from backup also didn't change anything.

This happens to me too. First on my 15 pro after installing ios18 then on my new 16 pro. I've reset the settings but the problem persists. It seems that it is not a hardware problem. I do not know how to fix it and cannot find any solution on the net

I noticed it last night when I woke up to my 14pro battery still under 30% after being plugged in/low power mode overnight. I had major issues with photo indexing not working on iOS 17 so though it was possibly just catching up, but even if that’s the case - this is not the way.

My battery health also dropped 2% since the update, maybe coincidentally, but I’m watching closely now.