How To Optimize Photo Storage On Your iPhone

If you are running out of storage space on your iPhone, you may think that removing some photos is a good way to free up space. But using iCloud Photo Library means that deleting a photo will delete it from all of your devices. The solution is not to try to delete a photo at all. You simply need to turn on Optimize iPhone Storage in your Photos settings. This will allow your iPhone to manage your photos so that only small thumbnails are stored for most photos. The original high-resolution photos will always be in iCloud, and can also be stored on your Mac. Optimizing allows you to get a lot of storage space back, while still having all of your photos available to you. You can do the same for your Mac or second Mac to save space.

Comments: 8 Responses to “How To Optimize Photo Storage On Your iPhone”

    Rod
    5 years ago

    Hi Gary, I see the movies in Photos are handled the same way when you Optimize iPhone Storage. But why on older movies, when I try to play the video, I get a circled ' ! ' and the video will not play?

    5 years ago

    Rod: Hard to say. Could be due to the format of those particular videos.

    Karl
    5 years ago

    Does iCloud store a high resolution copy of the photo taken?

    5 years ago

    Karl: Yes. If you are using iCloud Photo Library then the original photo is store on the iCloud servers.

    Gene
    5 years ago

    Gary, I lease 50gb from Apple iCloud Drive. Does Apple charge for use of say 120gb for photos? Not sure how they can do that forever. Is it just away of having a solid support infrastructure for their devices?

    5 years ago

    Gene: Not sure what you mean. Apple charges for cloud data storage like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, etc. It costs them money to maintain servers, so they charge for it.

    Dawn
    5 years ago

    My mac has 10's of thousands of photos dating back to 2011. After updating to Mojave, those photos are now added to my iCloud storage and my other apple devices (iPhone, iPad). I do not want them on my phone or iPad as it takes up valuable iCloud space.(I don't want to up my monthly fee) How can I go back to my phone and iPad syncing recent photos and those devices automatically storing to my mac? love the podcast

    5 years ago

    Dawn: First, you would need to turn off iCloud Photos for all devices. That will remove them from your iCloud Storage. When you do this on your Mac, be sure to choose any option that suggests that they stay on your Mac. But when you do it for your iPhone and iPad, you want them removed from those devices. Then you need to go back to syncing via iTunes for those devices. It will be quiet different as you'll have to sync via Photos to get your new photos from those devices to your Mac, and then sync via iTunes to copy over an album or more of the older photos you want. I'm not sure how familiar you are with those techniques, but if you only just switched to iCloud Photos then that is probably how you were doing it until then.

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