Insufficient storage on iPhone 13 with 1TB despite Google Photos warning

Local device storage (on your phone) is not the same thing as cloud storage on someone else's computers.

That's true whether you are talking about Apple-brand services ("iCloud", "iCloud Photos") or Google-brand services ("Google Drive", "Google Photos").

I don't use Google Photos on my iPhone – but I'm guessing you are using some form of synchronization where each, and every one one, of your photos exists both on your iPhone, and on Google's servers. Or perhaps you aren't synchronizing the two, but are offloading photos from your iPhone to Google's servers.

Either way, Google only provides 15 GB of free Google cloud storage. That's a lot if all that you have stored on Google's computers are the e-mails in a Gmail account, but it's not very much once you take lots of photos or videos (especially videos). If you want to continue to store a lot of stuff on Google's servers, you may need to purchase (rent) additional storage from Google.

Google One – Choose the Google One plan that's right for you

davenna144 wrote:

Why can’t I store the photos on the phone with a TB of storage, why can’t I stop using Google Photos, or how can I

My guess is that you are currently storing photos both on your phone (using part of the 1 TB of storage), and in the Google cloud (using Google Photos synchronization).

Google – Google Photos Overview

"You can sync your library and favorites during setup and your photos will automatically upload to the app."

That would be similar to the way that iCloud Photos works. With iCloud Photos, your photos exist in iCloud (on Apple's servers) and on every iPhone, iPad, or Mac synchronized with iCloud Photos. (Depending on how you have things set up, some of the copies of photos on your devices may be reduced-quality space-saving ones. However, all devices will attempt to keep copies of all photos.)

If you have all of your photos on your phone, or download them there, you could certainly stop using Google Photos – first grabbing photos, then turning OFF synchronization with Google Photos, and finally deleting the copies of the photos in the Google cloud, using a Web browser.

But then your photos would exist only on your phone, and unless you backed them up somewhere else, you'd be one catastrophe away from losing all of them.

There are many threads on these forums from people who didn't value their data enough to back it up, who then had some catastrophe happen, and come pleading for a way to recover their photos. Unfortunately, all too often, the photos are simply lost, and it doesn't matter how much the OP wants them back. The only thing we can do is to advise that "Backups must be made before catastrophe happens. Afterwards is [generally] too late."

Google Photos has nothing to do with the storage on your iPhone. If you are out of space on Google Photos, you'll need to pay Google for more space.

Note - whatever you decide to do, you should not store your photos only on your phone.

If you did that, and anything were to happen to your phone – e.g., someone stole it, you dropped it in water, or you simply forgot your passcode and had to erase the phone to get back in – you would lose all of your photos.

Transfer photos and videos from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac or PC - Apple Support

Microsoft Support – Import photos and videos from phone to PC