Iphone photos suddenly taking up LOTS of space?

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Iphone photos suddenly taking up LOTS of space?

Hi,

I switched from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone 8 (256gb) late January this year. Did an iTunes restore from the old phone.

When I made the switch, the iPhone 7 had about 10 000 photos, taking up 54GB of space on the phone.

Now, my Iphone 8 has about 20 000 photos, but it takes up a whopping 193GB of space on the new phone. Just a couple of weeks ago, it said 121GB and now it suddenly says 193GB, even though I haven’t taken many new photos since then. I use the latest IOS version.

I haven’t taken any unusally long videos (taking up a lot of space) with the iPhone 8 and I couldn’t locate any out-of-the-ordinary large photos or videos with my PC or my Macbook Pro. I did install WhatsApp for the first time around the time when the photo storage began increasing, but I uninstalled it completely a week or so later.

I spoke with the Apple phone support a couple of times but all they told me was to delete a lof of photos and that 20 000 photos is ”too much”. I get where they’re coming from, but I did buy the 256gb variant to be able to store a lot of photos, so if I just delete everything - what’s the point?

I don’t use iCloud photo library, and I don’t want to either.

Do any of you guys recognize this problem? Solutions?

Right now, the only solution I can come up with is to do a complete hard reset and to manually transfer the photos from a 3rd party backup software, in order to avoid any software bugs being transfered to the ”new” phone? Or should I try to do a complete iCloud backup after doing a hard reset?

Any help would be very much appreciated!

iPhone 8, iOS 11.4.1, 256gb

Posted on Jul 15, 2018 2:42 AM

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Answer 1

Lukasthlm Author

Level 1

5 points

Jul 24, 2018 2:44 AM in response to Lukasthlm

Just wanted to do a quick follow-up:

After doing several hard resets, restoring and even transferring to a brand new Iphone 8 256GB, I finally found out why the photos are taking up so much space: the phone saves dublicates with an ”E” in the file name, so one photo is saved both as e.g. ”IMG_0001.jpg” and ”IMG_E0001.jpg” - for all photos. This applies both to old photos and all new photos taken with the phone. HDR and filters are disabled and all camera settings are as they should be. Have tried resetting the phone and changing all settings, but the problem remains. This means that my ”new” iphone 8 256gb hasn’t room for any more photos than my old iphone 7 128gb, rendering the upgrade more or less useless.

Tried deleting the ”E” files using a Windows PC Explorer and a third party software on my Macbook, which istantly freed up roughly 80GB of space. But, the ”E” files automatically reappears the next day and 80GB gone again...

Have been in touch with the Apple Care support team twice but they have no solution, as usual.

Does anyone have any idea on how to resolve this issue? Surely the idea cant be for the phone to save duplicates of all images (And forcing me to keep both)?!

Although not ”an Apple fanboy”, I have been generally very pleased with my iPhones and always upgraded each year, but now I’m beginning to be tempted to switch to Android for the first time.

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Iphone photos suddenly taking up LOTS of space?

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