It seems my phone was not managing its local storage very well, and wasn't offloading photo data the way it is supposed to. This resulted in about 12 GB of on-device storage being eaten up over a few years.
Yesterday I did a big archiving operation, saving out about four years of photos from iCloud onto a local backup drive, then deleting them from the cloud. The photos disappeared from my iPad as expected, but the iPhone stubbornly would not sync correctly and let them go.
Even turning off iCloud Photos on the phone itself, it took a while for the photos to disappear, but when looking at the iPhone Storage panel in Settings, it still showed nearly 12 GB of space allocated to photos, when there were only a few shared photos stored locally on the device. Weird.
Even weirder, when I looked at the device in iTunes on my old Mac mini (running High Sierra), it showed over 8 GB of free space, compared to about 1 GB the device was reporting locally.
Clearly, iOS has a hard time managing and clearing out storage space once files have been deleted or sync'd to iCloud. Wiping and restoring from a backup cleared all that out (plus the mysterious "System Data") and my recent photos are now restoring to the phone from iCloud.
I think I might start doing this once or twice a year, unless Apple figures this stuff out. This isn't how it should be. I feel like I'm an early-2000s Windows user, who has to reinstall the OS from scratch every six months.
Yesterday I did a big archiving operation, saving out about four years of photos from iCloud onto a local backup drive, then deleting them from the cloud. The photos disappeared from my iPad as expected, but the iPhone stubbornly would not sync correctly and let them go.
Even turning off iCloud Photos on the phone itself, it took a while for the photos to disappear, but when looking at the iPhone Storage panel in Settings, it still showed nearly 12 GB of space allocated to photos, when there were only a few shared photos stored locally on the device. Weird.
Even weirder, when I looked at the device in iTunes on my old Mac mini (running High Sierra), it showed over 8 GB of free space, compared to about 1 GB the device was reporting locally.
Clearly, iOS has a hard time managing and clearing out storage space once files have been deleted or sync'd to iCloud. Wiping and restoring from a backup cleared all that out (plus the mysterious "System Data") and my recent photos are now restoring to the phone from iCloud.
I think I might start doing this once or twice a year, unless Apple figures this stuff out. This isn't how it should be. I feel like I'm an early-2000s Windows user, who has to reinstall the OS from scratch every six months.