iPhone 11 Pro iCloud storage question

[allymbader]

Hello! (Please move this if this is not the appropriate forum for it, but I wasn't quite sure where best to put it.)

I am confused about iCloud Photo and Message storage. I currently have the 200GB plan and it is 190GB full, but the only other option is to upgrade to a massive 2TB which seems unnecessary. What I dont understand is that within iCloud, my messages are taking up 56GB while only taking up 10GB on my iPhone itself. Why would they be different storage amounts? Isn't it the same messages and therefore should be the same amount of space?

And then photos are taking up a massive 123GB in iCloud but only 1.33 GB on my phone due to storage optimization. I have about 27000 photos and a fair amount of videos but 123GB still seems like an incredibly high amount of storage. Is there some way to optimize storage within iCloud as well??

 

[Marshall73]

On the phone optimised essentially means that it keeps thumbnails of the images rather than full images. Same with messages etc. It’s likely videos that are taking up the majority of the space. Have a clearout in photos of stuff you don’t want to keep, if you can’t then up to 2TB you go

i have the 2TB plan and share it with my family sharing members so they don’t need to purchase any storage. The get to use storage from the 2TB and it keeps their stuff separate from mine.

 

[mofunk]

How many devices do you have stored in iCloud? Your total can be a combination of all your Apple devices. If you have backed up to the cloud, over time it will be larger than what is currently stored.

You can go into your iPhone and delete some of those messages especially the meme's and photos you don't need. You should do this on all of your devices.

Go to Settings -General - iPhone Storage - Messages - in there just delete old videos, photos, etc that you don't need.

 

[hirsthirst]

Delete your Messages, or go through them and save any particularly important content to Files. 56GB is nuts IMO.