All Devices iCloud Photo Library takes up waaaay too much space in iOS/ iPad OS - why is that?

[autoshot]

Hello everyone!

I recently got a notification on my iPhone 11 Pro and my iPad Pro (both with 256GB storage) that there is not much storage left on either device. Of course I immediately checked in the settings app what was causing this situation.

Turns out the Photos-App is taking up almost 200GB on both devices!!


Weird, I thought, since I "only" have the 200GB iCloud storage plan with a little more than 10GB of free cloud storage and about 40GB worth of messages, backups and other small chunks of data. Consequently, on iCloud my photo library only takes up 150GB:

Even weirder, when I go into the Photos App on my Mac, it says that my entire library is worth only 118GB:

Do you have an explanation for why those 24672 Fotos and 1590 Videos only weigh about 118GB on my Mac, almost 150GB on iCloud and a whopping 200GB on my iDevices!?
More importantly, do you guys know how to fix this and re-gain ideally up to 70GB of that precious storage space?

Cheers,
Daniel

PS: Those screenshots were taken on macOS Catalina 10.15.4 and iOS 13.5, respectively.

 

[Shirasaki]

Photos stored on your device have a thumbnail library that is proportional to the number of photos you have. If you have a huge number of photos, that thing can be extremely big. You can probably find that thumbnail folder on your mac photos library.

Also, Mac library is probably not the full library, but a subset of your iCloud library, which then could also be another subset of your iPad library. It all depends on how much sync has been done between them.

 

[Bazza1]

Interesting. I have nowhere near that issue, but it occurs to me I went with a more 'unconventional' method that bypasses iCloud / Photos (on Mac) entirely. In my case, I have always kept my own photos (dated in sub-folders, no less) in their own Folder on the Mac. Not in the proprietary Photos / iPhotos app at all. And not sync'd to iCloud.

Meanwhile, on the iPhone, I have sync'd directly to it using iPhone > Photos > Sync photos to your device....

and then I chose which sub-folders to sync from there.

I have also ensured that the iCloud Sync is not on (Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Photos)

I appreciate I do not have a 'backup' of my photos on iCloud (though I do elsewhere, plus, of course, now on the iPhone), but the 631MB of photos I chose to sync are the same as the 631MB I find on my iPhone. If there is unintended bloat from thumbnails, etc as Shirasaki mentioned above, this would seem to bypass it.

 

[autoshot]

@ Shirasaki

I don‘t think the thumbnails take up almost as much space as my entire photo library (80 vs. 120GB). Also, if I click „optimize storage“ (so that essentially only the thumbnails of my photos are retained) the photos library on my iPhone/ iPad shrinks to less than 5GB. Regarding the Mac library, it‘s definitely the full library.

@ Bazza1

The way you‘re doing it wouldn‘t work for me, unfortunately, since I don‘t want to lose the synching of modifications.

 

[bradbomb]

So I have Optimize Storage on all my devices except my Mac Mini for my Photos Library:

macOS Photos (Mojave) Laptop - 30,006 Photos, 1,240 Videos 317.8 GB
macOS Photos (Mojave) Mac Mini - 30,014 Photos, 1,242 Videos 317.8 GB
iPhone X Storage - 4.41 GB
iPad Pro Storage - 5.43 GB
iCloud - 326 GB

iCloud is matching macOS closely. iPhone and iPad Pro only show the storage its actually using.

 

[Bazza1]

... @ Bazza1

The way you‘re doing it wouldn‘t work for me, unfortunately, since I don‘t want to lose the synching of modifications.

I hear what you're saying, but any changes / additions I make to my Pictures folder (and the chosen sub-folders within) on my computer do transfer over whenever I do an iPhone Sync. I do this as a matter of course manually once a week - more often if I feel its an important change. Plus I could set it up to automatically sync every time I connect my iPhone, but I'm a bit too much of a control freak / anal to do that.

 

[inkahauts]

Hello everyone!

I recently got a notification on my iPhone 11 Pro and my iPad Pro (both with 256GB storage) that there is not much storage left on either device. Of course I immediately checked in the settings app what was causing this situation.

Turns out the Photos-App is taking up almost 200GB on both devices!!
View attachment 917605

Weird, I thought, since I "only" have the 200GB iCloud storage plan with a little more than 10GB of free cloud storage and about 40GB worth of messages, backups and other small chunks of data. Consequently, on iCloud my photo library only takes up 150GB:
View attachment 917610

Even weirder, when I go into the Photos App on my Mac, it says that my entire library is worth only 118GB:
View attachment 917609

Do you have an explanation for why those 24672 Fotos and 1590 Videos only weigh about 118GB on my Mac, almost 150GB on iCloud and a whopping 200GB on my iDevices!?
More importantly, do you guys know how to fix this and re-gain ideally up to 70GB of that precious storage space?

Cheers,
Daniel

PS: Those screenshots were taken on macOS Catalina 10.15.4 and iOS 13.5, respectively.

Do you have a lot of shared albums that are generated by you? How about generated by others?

All three devices show the exact same amount of pictures and videos right?

Do you have any projects or third party apps that you use to mess with photos directly from the photos library?

 

[gank41]

I got a similar notification about not having enough storage space after I had done a screen recording. Checking in Settings/About and in Settings/General/iPhone Storage both showed the same amount of free space (over 260GB free) and checking my iCloud storage, I’ve got almost 1TB of free space. I don’t keep my iCloud Photo Library on my device, either. But, after maybe 5-6 hours there seemed to be no more issues and my photos seemed to have been synced across all devices. Weird. Was about the same time that you reported your issues.