I wonder if this is why. I just wish we could tell it “ok, I got a new phone, but I don’t want the full size of all these photos - please optimize the storage of photos now!” Haha
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iPhone 13 Pro Max Photos not optimizing storage with new iPhone
- Thread starter vtboyarc
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I believe Optimize Photos only does it’s thing during camera capture. After a photo is taken, it doesn’t get changed later to a different format when sitting in the photos app
Same issue. Glad to see I am not the only one.
iPhone 11 Pro Max to iPhone 13 Pro Max using phone to phone data transfer on Friday. Photos took up ~66GB on the iPhone 13 Pro Max and making the phone storage 126GB used out of 128GB capacity. I thought it might just take a few days to index/optimize, but after 3 days, it's only gone down to ~60GB, and my phone is now indicating 123GB used out of 128GB capacity. I thought with my storage being this low, the phone would have been a lot more aggressive in optimizing the photo library.
For comparison, my iCloud photo library is at 75GB. The photo library on my iPhone 11 Pro Max was at 6GB (and the phone was at 84GB used out of 256GB). The photo library on my iPad Pro is at ~10GB, with the iPad storage at 133GB used out of 256GB.
So somehow on the iPhone 13 Pro Max, despite my phone storage so close to running out, the photo library is still not optimizing properly. I have left it plugged in for most of the time the last few days, and plugged in overnight while I sleep. Hopefully it will sort itself out in a few days.
iPhone 11 Pro Max to iPhone 13 Pro Max using phone to phone data transfer on Friday. Photos took up ~66GB on the iPhone 13 Pro Max and making the phone storage 126GB used out of 128GB capacity. I thought it might just take a few days to index/optimize, but after 3 days, it's only gone down to ~60GB, and my phone is now indicating 123GB used out of 128GB capacity. I thought with my storage being this low, the phone would have been a lot more aggressive in optimizing the photo library.
For comparison, my iCloud photo library is at 75GB. The photo library on my iPhone 11 Pro Max was at 6GB (and the phone was at 84GB used out of 256GB). The photo library on my iPad Pro is at ~10GB, with the iPad storage at 133GB used out of 256GB.
So somehow on the iPhone 13 Pro Max, despite my phone storage so close to running out, the photo library is still not optimizing properly. I have left it plugged in for most of the time the last few days, and plugged in overnight while I sleep. Hopefully it will sort itself out in a few days.
I have decided to give up after about 5 times trying got phone to 160gb with 20gb in photos. Will stick with that for now
I am having a similar issue. 12 Pro only showed photos using around 6GB. After doing a direct transfer to the 13 Pro, Photos started taking up 40GB. I went ahead and turned off iCloud Photo Library which removed everything but there is still 19GB being taken up by Photos that I cant figure out how to get rid of. Considering restoring the phone and using my iCloud backup to see if that changes anything.
I'll be the black sheep here.... I did a system restore of my 12 PM after I bought my 13 PM. My pictures are still the same size. I do have to say mine is only at 1.69 GB though and not as high as others.
Exactly my issue. So annoying. Everything was all nice and optimized and I had tons of free space, now I’m nearly full up
Same here. Had only 160 used on my 12PM then transferred to the new 256 phone was 253gb. Apple had me do all this restore stuff and nothing has helped. Last rep said to set the phone up as new and manually add back all the apps. No thanks. Deleted a bunch of stuff I probably didn’t need but shouldn’t have had to.
Since I last posted, my usage has increased to 46GB. Still plenty of free space but... why Apple?!? Really irks me.
I had this same issue. When I used the direct transfer my photo storage took up nearly all my storage. I went to Apple yesterday and got no clear answer to why this happened. They suggested I do a restore from my back up. The back was from the 13pm with the storage issue, so wasn’t sure that would fix it. But it did. Went from using 70gb of photos down to 1 gb after the restore. It fixed my Apple Watch iPhone unlock feature too.
I had this issue when I did phone to phone transfer. I was upgrading from a 256gb XSMax and had about 100gb of free space on it with optimized photos. When the transfer completed on my new 13PM though, I noticed there was only about 50-60gb of free space. I did a full reset on the new 13PM and started over. This time, I setup as new and restored from my icloud backup. Everything transferred over fine and I had about 100gb of free space available again.
I'm having the same issue and have posted in this thread about it.
TL;DR. My old iPhone XR had about 2GB of photos, and now my iPhone 13 Pro suddenly has 66GB - all settings the same. I spoke with Apple Support today, and it was escalated to a caseworker who is due to revert to me in the next day or so.
TL;DR. My old iPhone XR had about 2GB of photos, and now my iPhone 13 Pro suddenly has 66GB - all settings the same. I spoke with Apple Support today, and it was escalated to a caseworker who is due to revert to me in the next day or so.
Think I might just go ahead and restore my 13 Pro and try using an iCloud backup and see if that fixes things vs waiting for Apple to drop a software update.
Let us know how it goes. I did the phone to phone and a restore from backup from my 12 to the 13 and both added a bunch of data.
I did that after someone posted…my photos went down from 20gb to 4gb, I turned off lossless audio, am now ok with that. Have about 140gb used vs 130gb on iPhone 12. Differences are music and system data. So am at reasonable level. So will leave storage as it is for now…
side note I have now got a messed up App Library everything thing is in other! Anyone know how to resolve this? They were ok on backed up phone?
I have had every iPhone since iphone3 never been this difficult
Weird. This morning my phone magically had 8gb more used space due to photos. So overnight instead of optimizing, it somehow added more space. I don’t get it. I’m now at 239 GB of space used on my 13 Pro Max, when my 12 Pro Max had 60 GB used when I transferred it over to the 13.
What the heck.
What the heck.
I had the issue on ios 15.1 beta 1 — photos were consuming over 70G of space. I updated to 15.1beta 2 about 2 hours ago, and now photos are using less space (30G), but the “System Data” has increased to almost 40G..