iCloud photo library is taking up too much space on iPhone

This is a user-to-user support forum. The information you posted regarding the sizes of the photos etc is interesting and may be of value to other users here but you may also want to post the suggestion for Apple to see at: https://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html

You likely won't get a response. The quote below is from the heading for that site:

We read all feedback carefully, but please note that we cannot respond to the comments you submit.

With luck, the response may eventually be some more options for iCloud.

I have the similar problems with 90gb photos/videos on iCloud, no problem with the 64 gb iPad where Photo Library takes up 13gb, but a constant problem with the 16gb iPhone 5s. I have to look for ways to free up space, even by deleting apps, podcasts, music, etc, but Photos wants to eat into that free space in no time. The "optimise iPhone storage" isn't as useful as I'd expect it to be, there should be a storage threshold that it should leave untouched and if the free storage drops below that line, reduce the space Photo Library is using.

You don't have to use iCloud Photo Library on all your devices. You can continue to use My Photo Stream on the iPhone and sync via iTunes, just as you did before.

That's a really good solution. Thanks.

I agree. It seems nuts that this is no 'in between' option, or a slider to tell the phone how many gigs of memory to limit photos to. Maybe some sort of date limiter. In other words, "include all photos for the last year".

Obviously, this is good for the shareholders, though, because everybody is going to have to get the max memory option on all their new devices!

At this point, I would highly recommend importing those pictures onto a computer of yours or an external Hard Drive for safe keeping and thus allowing you to delete those pictures and free up all that space once again.

So far, I haven't seen anything remotely like a solution to this problem on the forums, just a handful of Level 7+ users basically saying, 'it works fine!'.

TThe solution is to have fewer photos on your phone and/or optimize them. Go to Settings/iCloud, tap on Photos and set the Optimize option.

Hi Lawrence!

Mmm... you are one of the Level 7+ users I'm talking about...

a) one of the features of the iCloud solution is that you don't get to select how many photos are on your phone. It decides for you.

b) obviously, I have turned on the optimize feature. That is in the original post, and seems to be about the only thing one can control.

Any further thoughts?

Using iCloud photos it's all or nothing. What I do is use iCloud to sync my photos to my computer, then transfer them to Google Picasa where I edit them and organize them into albums, Upload them to Picasa Web, then use the MyPics app (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mypics-google-photos-manager/id351297486?mt=8) to view the albums on my phone. MyPics lets you selectively cache albums on the phone.

Just spent some time at the Apple Store today and can report that the Genius has experienced the same issue.

In essence, if the iCloud Library is LARGE and the amount of storage of the device is small... you will experience running out of space. We didn't get into specifics about what numbers might be involved, but the general point is that the 'optimized' setting will only do so much.

So, until this is changed, you will end up running out of space on your device.