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Photos taking up an unusual amount of space?

I have a 3rd-gen iPad Wi-Fi running iOS 7. A couple days ago I was syncing my iPad with my computer and it froze. I had to do a hard reset (holding power button and home button) on the iPad and it would sometimes be stuck on the Apple logo and would sometimes start up fine. But it would always freeze when trying to backup. I never had this problem before, but I thought the problem might be related to low free space. The "Other" category had grown to about 7.6GB. I had about 1.2GB free. I was syncing my Aperture library to it (just over 19,000) photos and it was taking up too much space, so I thought I would remove the photos. I have 76 pictures in my camera roll.


In iTunes, I unchecked syncing from Aperture so that there would be no photos from my computer syncing to my iPad. After it completed the sync, both iTunes and the iPad showed that about 43GB were still being taken up by photos, even though in iTunes, nothing under the Photos tab was checked. After trying multiple times, I decided that I would do a restore. (I also tried all sorts of steps to reduce the "Other" section, but to no avail.) So I restored iOS 7.0.2 on the iPad and restored from the backup. Everything seemed OK, so I thought I would try syncing just one event/project from Aperture. It contained 102 photos. After the sync, the iPad said that over 43GB was being taken up by photos and that I only had 894MB free. So I tried removing the photos from the iPad via iTunes again. Same issue; even though no photos were being synced, there was no space on my iPad.


So I did another restore and this time didn't sync any photos from Aperture. So the only photos should be the ones from the camera roll. Now iTunes shows those 76 photos taking up 3.96GB (screenshot below). Which makes no sense. Each photo is not 53MB in size! These are all small pictures saved from Safari or e-mails. At most, a couple MB each.


I don't want to lose app data, like game saves, etc...so I don't want to just set this up as a new iPad. I don't understand why this is happening. My iPhone 5s has no problems syncing my entire Aperture library on the same computer.


Any help would be greatly appreciated!


User uploaded file

iPad (3rd gen) Wi-Fi, iOS 7

Posted on Oct 20, 2013 2:24 AM

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21 replies

Oct 20, 2013 3:13 AM in response to mrbofus

Can you display the directory with those 76 photos on your PC?

Then sort that directory by size from large to small.

That way you will see immediately, which photos are actually eating up all that huge memory space.


It is pointless to restore your iPad from the backup with those photos, because nothing will change, as you are always restoring the same photos.


By the way, when you restore your iPad correctly, your iPad will always be set up as a new iPad during that restore phase, but then your iPad's data will be restored from the backup - provided a backup is actually available!

Oct 20, 2013 3:20 AM in response to Apfelwurm

Apfelwurm wrote:


Can you display the directory with those 76 photos on your PC?

Then sort that directory by size from large to small.

That way you will see immediately, which photos are actually eating up all that huge memory space.


I'm using a Mac, but yes, I can see the size of the photos in the Camera Roll using Image Capture. The largest of the photos is 1.2MB, and the smallest of the photos 13.7KB. Average size for each picture is probably a couple hundred kilobytes. So these photos should be taking well under 90MB of space. Nowhere near 3.96GB!

Oct 20, 2013 3:27 AM in response to Apfelwurm

Apfelwurm wrote:


It is pointless to restore your iPad from the backup with those photos, because nothing will change, as you are always restoring the same photos.


I understand that if you're restoring from a backup, nothing will change (although that's not always true either; if you try to restore from a backup with very little free space on your iPad/iPhone/iPod touch, iTunes will tell you there's not enough free space to restore from a backup, which makes no sense, since you're replacing what's on your device with the exact same amount of data, and since the data currently exists, there is enough free space).


My issue is that these 76 photos do not take up even 100MB, much less 3.96GB.

Oct 20, 2013 3:30 AM in response to mrbofus

I would have preferred that you let the OS of your Mac display the size of the photos, not 3rd party software.


Anyway, other than that, the only advice I have is to try a reset first: Press and hold both Sleep/Wake and Home buttons until the Apple logo appears.

Give the Apple logo time to stay on the screen, about a minute or two.


If the reset doesn't fix it, try a restore:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414

Oct 20, 2013 3:33 AM in response to Apfelwurm

Apfelwurm wrote:


I would have preferred that you let the OS of your Mac display the size of the photos, not 3rd party software.


Image Capture is not 3rd-party software; it is software that Apple wrote and is part of the operating system. And on the Mac, as far as I know, there is no native GUI way to browse the files of a camera that is connected to the computer.

Oct 20, 2013 3:34 AM in response to Apfelwurm

Apfelwurm wrote:


Anyway, other than that, the only advice I have is to try a reset first: Press and hold both Sleep/Wake and Home buttons until the Apple logo appears.

Give the Apple logo time to stay on the screen, about a minute or two.


If the reset doesn't fix it, try a restore:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414


I'm not sure you read my original post. I stated that I have tried all of those steps multiple times.

Oct 20, 2013 3:37 AM in response to mrbofus

Yes, I understand that the photos take up a certain amount of space.


We'll have to find out why.


You could also sync your iPad without syncing any photos.

Afterwards you can sync the photos again, but not before you have assured yourself that the photos do not take up an abnormal amount of space in the original directory on your Mac. And I mean the OS of your Mac, not 3rd party software.

Oct 20, 2013 3:43 AM in response to Apfelwurm

Apfelwurm wrote:


Yes, I understand that the photos take up a certain amount of space.


We'll have to find out why.


You could also sync your iPad without syncing any photos.

Afterwards you can sync the photos again, but not before you have assured yourself that the photos do not take up an abnormal amount of space in the original directory on your Mac. And I mean the OS of your Mac, not 3rd party software.


Does software written by Apple as part of the OS count as 3rd-party software?


And I'm not sure why you are so focused on finding out the size of the individual files beyond what I've already stated. iTunes and the iPad report 76 photos as taking up 3.96GB (or 3.95GB) of space. None of those 76 files are that large. This is after multiple soft and hard resets and multiple restores.


I certainly don't own a camera capable of taking pictures where one photo takes up 53MB of space. In addition, none of the 76 pictures come from a camera that I own. They are all small files downloaded from websites that I have manually saved. As I stated, the files range in size from 13.7KB to 1.2MB. All small files.

Oct 20, 2013 3:49 AM in response to Apfelwurm

Apfelwurm wrote:


Yes, I read your original post and also that the Apple logo stayed on the screen for too long.


Then why would you tell me to do a hard reset and then a restore when I already stated that I performed both multiple times?



Apfelwurm wrote:


I also want to make sure, that you follow the correct restore procedure.


How would one incorrectly perform a restore? If you want to set up as a new iPad, you click on the "Restore iPad..." button, and if you want to restore from a backup, you click on the "Restore Backup..." button. I supposed a third option is to "Restore iPad..." and then restore from backup.


How would one perform any of those steps incorrectly?

Oct 20, 2013 3:51 AM in response to Apfelwurm

Apfelwurm wrote:


OK, I don't know what is possible on the Mac.

In Windows it is possible to display the size of any file in a directory.


On a Mac, when you connect a camera directly to the computer, it automatically opens up your photo management program of choice (iPhoto or Aperture, for example) and brings up the import screen. If you take the memory card out of the camera and connect it to the computer, it shows up as an external storage device and you can browse the files just like you would any other directory or drive. But with the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch devices, you obviously can't take out a memory card, so when you connect it, the OS recognizes it as both something that should sync with iTunes and also as a camera, not as a memory card.

Photos taking up an unusual amount of space?

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