Photos taking up too much storage space

Question

Photos taking up too much storage space

I have a 128 GB iPhone 7. My photo library is about 340 GB, I've turned on optimized storage on my iOS 11 phone.

The Settings app is showing about half my storage being taken by photos, but if it is actually taking 97.82 GB then it's more like 76% of my storage. I keep receiving low space warnings and my phone is slowing down due to lack of space. Any ideas on how I can force photos to take less space? The photos app says it's "Updated" at the bottom and I've been on Wifi all day, so it should have been able to sort itself out. I've tried restarting the phone, with no change.

iPhone 7, iOS 11.0.3

Posted on Oct 28, 2017 10:33 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

léonie

Level 10

194,331 points

Oct 29, 2017 8:05 PM in response to Sandbox Wizard

Even optimized, Photos is trying to use as much free storage as possible, so you do not need to download each and every photo from iCloud. Photos will start optimizing more photos, when other apps are claiming more storage.

How large is your Photos Library in iCloud? Photos can reduce the size of he library on your iPhone to roughly 10 percent of the size in iCloud.

If you want to start over with a very small Photos library on your iPhone, you could disable iCloud Photo Library on your iPhone and then delete all photos from the iPhone, once you signed out of iCloud Photo Library (only, if you are sure that all photos have been uploaded to iCloud).

Then enable iCloud Photo Library again with "Optimize Storage" enabled. Initially, only a few original image files will download from iCud, and the local library will be small.

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Answer 2

Oct 29, 2017 11:58 AM in response to Sandbox Wizard

After an hour in a chat with Apple support I'm told this is expected behaviour. My 64 GB iPad, linked to the same photo library is taking 13 GB and has 20 GB free. This seems like a much better balance to me. I fail to see why the phone needs to have nearly 100 GB of photos on it.

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Answer 3

Oct 29, 2017 8:12 PM in response to léonie

Thanks léonie. I'd say that still isn't all of it. I was able to take 3 pictures today. When I tried to show my wife the pictures a couple hours later they had already been moved off my device and it was trying to redownload them. I gave it a solid 2 minutes before giving up, it couldn't get them. On my iPad I was able to download them right away and show them. So it's not just an optimization thing and trying to prevent downloading if today's pictures are being removed from the device.

Just now I took 6 screenshots and am receiving the out of storage message again. It says I have 1 GB free and photos isn't doing anything to free space. Photos is now taking 100.59 GB of my 128.

My whole photo library is 314 GB.

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