Photos app taking up 5GB in "other" storage

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Photos app taking up 5GB in "other" storage

I've started paying for the 200GB iCloud storage to give me some space on my 16GB iPhone 5c.

I have about 30GB of photos and videos which are in the Photos app on my Mac and in the cloud.

I have the "Optimise iPhone Storage" selected but whenever I take videos or photos it just makes the storage of my iPhone smaller. To the point where I had no storage and deleted all the music and apps off my phone. However if I go to some recent photos and videos I have to download them from the cloud (suggesting they are deleted off my phone and uploaded to the cloud).

I then plugged my iPhone into iTunes and see theres 2GB of the Photos (presumably all the optimized photos / thumbnails in moments) + 5GB of other!

This happened last month and I did everything, deleted emails, restored from backup, restored from just iCloud and they all reduced the other to 1-2GB which seems ok. But a few weeks down the line it's back up to 5GB, which never used to happen before I started using Photos and paying for the iCloud subscription.

I've deleted the "recently deleted" photos so it isn't them either.

Is anyone else having this problem? Why when storage is low (say under 500mb) doesn't Photos upload all photos and videos to the cloud (and delete off phone) to free up storage instead of me having to delete photos and apps?!

Would really appreciate any help thanks.

iPhone 5c, iOS 8.3

Posted on Jul 1, 2015 5:15 AM

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Answer 1

fromsouth

Level 5

4,945 points

Jul 1, 2015 6:20 AM in response to miniflyer

It is possible that I am wrong, but me thinks:

Sometimes when you get once to the point where iphone storage is overfilled strange things happen. After they do IOS is unable to read files properly and it starts to be present and grow exponentially no matter what backup you restore from. If that is the case you can only restore as new. That should fix corruption that makes showball your "Other", but there is one more advice that you need to follow if you decide to proceed. You library is rather large and I would not use IPL (icloud photo library) unless I thought my computer is going to fail, but you are using it. Which means that after you setup your phone you have to allow library to download to your phone before making any changes to the phone itself (like sync, etc). First it has to start downloading, then at some point after it passes 5 or 10 gigs it has to start optimizing and finish optimizing. I can't possibly imagine how long that part will take, but only after that you can start making changes to phone. If you do not follow, IOS may do what it has been doing to you before, stop recognizing files in library properly.

All that is pure guess, since I have no idea what really is going on ... and just base it on your description, good luck.

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