“Available” Capacity different from iPhone Storage

antonio6908 wrote:

For additional context I have 4.7 GB used of 6.05 GB available in my iCloud storage.

When I first saw this, I did a double-take. There are 185,441 photos that are taking up more than 512 GB on your phone. If you were on the "free" 5 GB iCloud storage level, there is no way that most of your photos would have copies in iCloud (whether in iCloud Photos or in iCloud backups). You would potentially be operating without any backups, and risking losing all 185,441 photos to a single catastrophe (stolen phone, forgotten passcode, etc.)

Then I saw the screenshots which say that you have 4.7 TB used of 6.05 TB available in iCloud storage – and that iCloud Photos is using 4.5 TB of iCloud storage space. (1 TB of storage space = 1,000 GB of storage space.)

So it looks like what is happening is that

• You have way more photos than would possibly fit – at full size – onto your phone.
• You are using iCloud Photos and are using the "Optimize iPhone Storage" feature of iCloud Photos. Although the phone is keeping local copies of all of your photos and videos, many of the local copies are space-saving ones.
• Your iPhone is automatically adjusting the size of its local Photos database – substituting space-saving copies for full-size ones when device storage gets "too full", and reversing the process when device storage becomes available. As a result, your local device storage use hovers near, but not at, the "full" mark.

antonio6908 wrote:

After deleting some large media and files I checked [Settings > General > About] again to see if I was making a dent and the “Available” line under “Capacity” now shows 16 GB. However, “iPhone Storage” still shows 1.01 TB. Why are these two readings different?

Note that 16 GB = .016 TB. So perhaps your iPhone Storage should have reduced to 1.00 TB.