Photos app storage growing despite no new photos for two months

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Photos app storage growing despite no new photos for two months

I have 39,200 items in my photo library. I have an iCloud subscription with cloud sync enabled. I haven't taken any new photos for the last two months, but the space occupied by the Photos app in my iPhone storage is growing by about 100-200 megabytes every day and is currently at 206 gigabytes. This is a lot for my 256 gigabyte iPhone, and I'm sure this figure is unreasonable and there's some kind of memory leak because the Photos app's storage in iCloud is 170 gigabytes and doesn't constantly grow, but remains stable. Since the space occupied by photos locally is growing every day, I have to delete apps and music to have at least some free space on the device, but this only helps for a short time because the Photos app takes up all the freed space in my iPhone storage after a couple of days, and then I'm out of storage again. Once again: I haven't taken any new photos for the past two months. Instead, I've been deleting existing ones, and after deleting photos from my library, I immediately delete them permanently in the "Recently Deleted" section. My iPhone has become unusable! I believe a local library should be 170 gigabytes, not 200+.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: iPhone storage leak! (Photos)

iPhone 15 Pro Max, iOS 26

Posted on Feb 1, 2026 5:16 AM

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Answer 1

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Richard.Taylor

Level 6

17,655 points

Feb 1, 2026 7:14 AM in response to camandella

The Photos Library isn't just a bunch of pictures, and the storage space used doesn't depend on only on how many photographs you take. Photos is a non-destructive editor, so the original picture files are never touched. The pictures we see on the screen are separate thumbnails and preview versions created, sometimes on the fly, so that we can scan through our images more quickly. Just looking at pictures can create new files! Not looking at pictures can cause the Library size to diminish. In addition, Photos scans through the Library of pictures to find details that enhance and speed up searches, for instance. The Library size is dynamic, and it keeps growing or shrinking as the need arises.

One example of that is the use of Optimize Storage, which is pretty magic for pictures. You can use "Optimize Storage" on the Mac, on your iPhone, or on your iPad, and you can set this on any device, independent of the others. If you set a device to "Optimize Storage," then Photos may store only smaller screen sized images on the device and rely on iCloud to keep the full sized original images. This is great, since with the lower resolution images you can scan through pictures very quickly, and they look great on the screen. And, if Optimize is chosen, and you want to edit or crop a picture, Photos will reach out to iCloud to get the full sized Original for you to work with. It's the same for editing or printing or anything that demands the full picture. Your optimized Library may take up less than 20% of the space of a fully downloaded Library. On my iPhone, Photos takes up way less than 10% of the space it uses on my Mac, because I don't do editing on my phone, so there is no need to download the originals at all.

So what you describe seems pretty reasonable to me. I think that if I were you, I would check out the Optimize option.

How do you back up your pictures? Do you have a Mac?

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