Photos app using 4x more storage on iOS 15

[ihakim]

I updated to iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 and the photos app on my phone is literally using over 4x as much space. I have always stored the originals on my phone and they are all synced via iCloud photos. Before the update photos accounted for about 7 GBs of space on both my iPhone and iPad. Now it's requiring over 30 GBs of space on both devices. Something is wrong becuase it still shows as less than 7 GBs on iCloud which is correct. It's especially infuriating because my phone is 128 GB and this is now eating up a ton of space.

Any thoughts? Screenshots attached. I regret updating to iOS 15.

 

[yudilks]

How many photos you have in your photo library? Do you have video? Depending the number of items you have, the 30GB might be the actual size of all your original photos and videos.

 

[ihakim]

How many photos you have in your photo library? Do you have video? Depending the number of items you have, the 30GB might be the actual size of all your original photos and videos.

I appreciate the suggestion but that is not the case. 1,983 photos, 8 videos. The video accounts for 421.1 MB total (I counted each video file individually). If I do the math, this means that images are averaging 15.12 MB per picture in HEIC format. A spot check of the last 5 pictures I have taken yields the following file sizes: 1.7 MB, 1.8 MB, 1.5 MB, 0.9 MB, 1.8 MB.

I check my phone storage frequently so I am confident that both devices were using approximately 7 GBs for photos- this would mean around 3-3.5 MB per photo which is far more consistent with the file sizes listed above.

Something is very wrong here with the iOS update and I wouldn't be surprised since other people are having storage bugs as well though they are different. The math doesn't add up to account for 30 GB of storage as I described above and it increased 4x overnight.

As another data point, my wife's iPad Pro on iOS 14.7.1 has 9,006 photos and 247 videos (most are short) which takes up 33.1 GB of space in full size (not optimized photos storage).

 

[yudilks]

Yeah, I agree with you since you have only < 2000 images/videos. You might want to toggle the iCloud library on and off again.

It helped me on the opposite case, I want to keep an optimized copy only, but the phone somehow kept the original copy instead.

 

[Shirasaki]

How many photos you have in your photo library? Do you have video? Depending the number of items you have, the 30GB might be the actual size of all your original photos and videos.

The kind of weird part is iCloud library of all places have said 7GB, tho it could be wrong (and have been before for not just a handful of people).

 

[ihakim]

The kind of weird part is iCloud library of all places have said 7GB, tho it could be wrong (and have been before for not just a handful of people).

Exactly. I even tried flashing the update again from the ipsw file and toggling iCloud photos but no dice.

 

[cakebytheocean]

ios15 has a known bug where it is inaccurately reporting storage usage. Your issue is likely attributable to that.

 

[ihakim]

Unfortunately iOS 15.0.1 did not fix this on either device.

 

[richxps]

Same here , I use iCloud for photos but my phone shows I’m using 30g use of photos, along with iCloud. Strange thing is I copied my 12 pro max so it should be the same but it’s not , wonder if it’s a bug only on the 13 ‘s

 

[ihakim]

I'll probably wait until iOS 15.1 and if it's still not fixed then will restore my devices from backup and see if it helps. I wish I just stayed on iOS 14. Lesson learned.

 

[antiprotest]

I'll probably wait until iOS 15.1 and if it's still not fixed then will restore my devices from backup and see if it helps. I wish I just stayed on iOS 14. Lesson learned.

Sorry this happened to you. Such things should have been addressed in beta. That's what betas are for.

 

[cakebytheocean]

Save yourself the trouble restoring from back up and even setting up as new doesn’t fix this. I tried it on my 12 pro max and 13 pro max to no avail

 

[cynics]

Probably cache being reported incorrectly....

Do you have a Mac or PC you can verify this with? I never used Photos on a windows machine however on a Mac I can just select all the photos. 'Get info' (Properties on Windows) and it will tell me how many photos are there and and how much storage they are using.





There is 1 of 2 things going on here. The photos are consuming that much space via duplicates or something of that nature. OR the data is not being labeled correctly giving the impression that something else is photos.

Personally I think its the later. You are moving around A LOT of data however you don't have any cache, documents/data, or "Other data" in an operating system that caches data to be deleted as much as it possibly can? Seems odd to me. Btw that is the most efficient way to operate mobile OS.

We can make a couple easy test for both of these scenarios.

First, plug into iTunes/Finder and tap SYNC. Recheck what the computer says the data is and see what the device says it is.

For scenario 1...Goto iCloud.com look at the amount of photos you have. Compare between the webpage and your devices. Verify there isn't dupes or something weird going on like a movie all your movies in iTunes sitting in Photos. Anything....

For scenario 2...Download 35-40gb of data onto one of the devices. If that cached data is just reporting it self as photos then you'll see the photo data usage magically drop (like Other data would in prior versions of iOS).

I'm not super keen on how APFS works but you MIGHT be able to record photo data usage on the iPhone 13 and then record a video in its highest bit rate mode for 15-20 minutes. Look at the size of the video, add that to the previously recorded data usage and it should be the sum of those too. If its less that data usage figure isn't being accurately reported. The idea behind that is recording a large video will have the phone clear some space and if there if not data usage is cache then the sums should add up near perfectly.

Regardless we know its a bug, we just need to figure out how that data is being used.

 

[cynics]

I did some more investigation. I have a new iPhone SE handy with a new AppleID on it so I could play around with this without worry of losing anything.

So I recorded a 4k 60fps video that was around 2 gb on the iPhone SE. I saved it to photos. As you can see in this photo there is 2.2gb of photos, and iCloud Photo is asking me to turn it on to move that 2gb file into iCloud.



I then deleted the video, and removed it from recently deleted.



Now when I look in iPhone storage the 2.2gb of data is still sitting under Photos. If we look at iCloud Photos now we can see it doesn't have data to upload anymore it just suggests turning it on.



Technically the video is still there but its cached. It will be overwritten by other photos and videos...so lets do that...

I took 50 photos rapid fire.



And we can see that Photo usage is still 2.2gb. However if you look at the iCloud Photo suggestion it now says 513.9mb if I enable it and upload those photos to iCloud.



That 513.9mb is very odd to me. Not sure what would be uploaded exactly because all the photos on the phone are 151.5mb.



However it scales fairly well. I deleted 26 of the 50 photos....



And we are at 234.8mb. So yeah that is a bit weird however notice we are still at 2.2gb.

ANYWAY Long story short, everything is technically fine. The photos app is recording its cache and junk as "photos". The phone will use that storage space for other things if needed. Apple has made if very difficult for the average user to see how much usable data they have though. I think we will eventually see an update to address this, just go back to saying "Other"...

 

[ihakim]

I did some more investigation. I have a new iPhone SE handy with a new AppleID on it so I could play around with this without worry of losing anything.

So I recorded a 4k 60fps video that was around 2 gb on the iPhone SE. I saved it to photos. As you can see in this photo there is 2.2gb of photos, and iCloud Photo is asking me to turn it on to move that 2gb file into iCloud.

View attachment 1855434

I then deleted the video, and removed it from recently deleted.

View attachment 1855435

Now when I look in iPhone storage the 2.2gb of data is still sitting under Photos. If we look at iCloud Photos now we can see it doesn't have data to upload anymore it just suggests turning it on.

View attachment 1855436

Technically the video is still there but its cached. It will be overwritten by other photos and videos...so lets do that...

I took 50 photos rapid fire.

View attachment 1855437

And we can see that Photo usage is still 2.2gb. However if you look at the iCloud Photo suggestion it now says 513.9mb if I enable it and upload those photos to iCloud.

View attachment 1855439

That 513.9mb is very odd to me. Not sure what would be uploaded exactly because all the photos on the phone are 151.5mb.

View attachment 1855440

However it scales fairly well. I deleted 26 of the 50 photos....

View attachment 1855449

And we are at 234.8mb. So yeah that is a bit weird however notice we are still at 2.2gb.

ANYWAY Long story short, everything is technically fine. The photos app is recording its cache and junk as "photos". The phone will use that storage space for other things if needed. Apple has made if very difficult for the average user to see how much usable data they have though. I think we will eventually see an update to address this, just go back to saying "Other"...

Thank you for taking the time to do all this testing! I've come to the conclusion that this is a bug in iOS 15 after coming across this thread with tons of people having the same issue as me. Even though I haven't "optimized my photos" the bug they are experiencing seems to be the same.

Photos not optimizing storage with new iPhone

Hey all! So I got the iPhone 13 Pro Max. My iPhone 12 Pro Max had 67gb of spaced used on it. I did the transfer to the new iPhone, and now it has a whopping 232gb of used space. Looking at iPhone storage, it’s due mainly to photos. I do have “optimize iPhone storage” turned on under Photos...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[contacos]

I deactivated iCloud Photo Library yesterday because my iPad claimed 30 GB after a complete wipe, without restoring from a backup instead of roughly 4 GB (locally) as before. After I deleted literally every single photo from the iPad. The storage still claimed 8 GB of photos even though it was empty!

Now I activated iCloud Photo Library again and the photo app is taking less storage but now I have a huge "others" instead.

Same on my iPhone by the way. I used to have 102 GB of 128 GB free, now I have 63 GB free because iOS is leaving too many images on the device itself + big "others"

 

[mark-y]

I believe the issue may be related to Live Text feature introduced with iOS 15.

iPhone 13 photos storage doubled after up… - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

I keep my photo storage optimised/stored in iCloud and have comfortably fit into a 200GB storage shared with my partner.
However after I transferred from an iPhone XR -> iPhone 13 all of a sudden my photos usage jumped and they’re now trying to encourage me to move to the much more expensive 2TB plan.

The users in the above thread were also keeping local photo copies on their iPhone and found that if they disabled Live Text their local photos storage dropped back down to previous levels.

Unfortunately though this “fix” doesn’t push the same storage reduction to the iCloud copies, and at sacrifice of disabling Live Text function.
So I’m still not sure how to solve the iCloud quota issue, but it seems like this is happening to multiple people.

For anyone in this thread that is using local storage does the above option also reduce your photos size back to pre-upgrade size? And if so does anyone have any ideas on how to get the iCloud copies to recognize it too?

 

[MarcinRSE]

I updated to iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 and the photos app on my phone is literally using over 4x as much space. I have always stored the originals on my phone and they are all synced via iCloud photos. Before the update photos accounted for about 7 GBs of space on both my iPhone and iPad. Now it's requiring over 30 GBs of space on both devices. Something is wrong becuase it still shows as less than 7 GBs on iCloud which is correct. It's especially infuriating because my phone is 128 GB and this is now eating up a ton of space.

Any thoughts? Screenshots attached. I regret updating to iOS 15.

I have the exact same issue. My photos before the update were 30 gb and now they are 51..