iCloud Large iCloud Photo Library Draining iPhone Battery

[MysticVoyager847]

I have a good size iCloud Photo library that is synced to my iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

I'm currently over 27K photos and the library size is 224GB in iCloud.

For the past 3 months, I have had very poor battery life on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the top user of my battery is Photos background sync. My phone is overheating regularly as this is occurring.

I have logged over 20 phone calls to Apple Support and can not get any meaningful help. They've declared it a hardware issue and replaced my phone twice. They've had me do an Erase with Finder on the Mac and insisted I not restore from an iCloud backup, adamant the issue was in my restore. The problem continues to follow me.

I've gotten answers like "you've got a big library, turn on Low Power Mode."

I agree I have a lot of photos, but I can't find any maximum photo count or library size that I'm exceeding. I found a Shared Albums article that mentions a limit of 10,000 items PER DAY - that makes me feel like iCloud Photos can handle large libraries and I'm not overdoing it?

Curious from any validation from people with libraries larger than mine working okay, or would gladly take any suggestions for any corrective action I could perform to address the problem. Thanks!

 

[AZhappyjack]

I only have about 10K photos, and am not experiencing any significant battery issues with Photos. I don't think there is a hard limit on the number of photos in the library, and it would make sense that more photos would generate more activity and, therefore more battery drain.

However, at some point I would think that things would settle down, after all of the photos get synced to all of your devices. As I understand the sync process, photos on your phone and in your iCloud account would sync, and things would improve. Again, my understanding is that once a photo is in iCloud library it syncs from that library to the individual devices, which is to say, photos don't get synced directly from your phone to iCloud and from your phone to iPad and from your phone to Mac... that each device syncs to iCloud and that's the end of it.

Do you continue to edit, add/remove photos at a high rate? The puzzler for me is the ongoing drain on the battery.

 

[MysticVoyager847]

There was no significant change to my photo library when the problem began nor as it has happened for the majority of the past 3 months. I'd estimated I add 0-30 photos and/or screenshots per day.

 

[AZhappyjack]

There was no significant change to my photo library when the problem began nor as it has happened for the majority of the past 3 months. I'd estimated I add 0-30 photos and/or screenshots per day.

I cannot imagine adding 30 photos/screenshots per day having any impact on the photos app synching and/or causing the issues that you describe. This is a head-scratcher, for sure.

Once the syncing is caught up, it should not take much to sync an additional 30 images.