Pictures reporting large amount of space used

[Superman730]

I posted this on the Apple Forums but I always find the MacRumors community more helpful then they are. Mods, if you feel this should be in a different spot, feel free to move it.

I wasn't sure how else to word that title, but my father-in-law has an iPhone 5c running iOS 7.0.6 16GB. For some reason it keeps saying the hard drive is full whenever he tries to take a picture. Under usage it says 4.7 GB used for the camera roll (0 bytes Photo Library and 3.6KB Photo Stream). The breakdown of items in the photos app says he has 321 photos, 27 Videos and 6 panoramas. None of his videos are much longer than a minute. I feel like this should not take up that much space and there's something wrong. My 32GB iPhone 5 running iOS 8.1.1 with 898 photos and 26 videos and my usage reports 3.6 GB used. Is there something I should use to fix the phone reporting or finding where there's hidden files or something? I'm lost here!

 

[predation]

Videos will destroy the memory

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Also check iMessages. The pictures and videos will take up space there

 

[skiltrip]

Is there anything in the recently deleted folder? I overlooked this recently and after deleting a ton of videos, the space was still taken up and I didn't understand why, until I saw I had to empty the recently deleted folder. Just figured it worth a mention.

 

[Superman730]

Is there anything in the recently deleted folder? I overlooked this recently and after deleting a ton of videos, the space was still taken up and I didn't understand why, until I saw I had to empty the recently deleted folder. Just figured it worth a mention.

I don't think so, wasn't Recently Deleted Photos added in iOS8? I told him I'm going to have to remove all the photos and videos and see if that then shows 0kb used.

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Videos will destroy the memory

But I have more videos than him and less space taken up. About how large is a 1 minute recorded video?

Also check iMessages. The pictures and videos will take up space there

Would the phone report this as space taken up in iMessage or Photos? Because his iMessage only reports a little over 800MB used.

 

[Mak47]

This could be caused by a number of things.

First, 27 approx 1 minute videos, at 1080P will take up a lot of space. Anywhere from 1-3 GB is totally plausible. The length alone isn't what determines their size, it's also how much color variation is present, how much movement and variances in the audio. The other factor is that you said they're not "much" longer than a minute. This is highly subjective, without exact numbers it's pretty hard to estimate size. If 10 of them are 1:30 and 17 of them are 1:15 it adds up to a lot more content.

He also has 6 panoramas. iPhone panoramas are pretty large files, up to 27 megapixels if I remember right.

321 photos can also take up a large amount of space.

In comparing to your iPhone, which is running iOS 8--do you have the iCloud photos beta turned on? Is it optimizing your storage? It sounds like it might be. This feature wasn't available in iOS 7, so he would still be storing full quality image files on his phone.

Upgrade his software and turn on iCloud photos and the amount will reduce.

 

[Superman730]

This could be caused by a number of things.

First, 27 approx 1 minute videos, at 1080P will take up a lot of space. Anywhere from 1-3 GB is totally plausible. The length alone isn't what determines their size, it's also how much color variation is present, how much movement and variances in the audio. The other factor is that you said they're not "much" longer than a minute. This is highly subjective, without exact numbers it's pretty hard to estimate size. If 10 of them are 1:30 and 17 of them are 1:15 it adds up to a lot more content.

I should have been more clear, none of his videos were over a minute... except one. We found the culprit. It seems he had a TEN MINUTE video basically in the middle of the list that we overlooked. We found it because we took all the photos and videos off and it cleared up all the space.

In comparing to your iPhone, which is running iOS 8--do you have the iCloud photos beta turned on? Is it optimizing your storage? It sounds like it might be. This feature wasn't available in iOS 7, so he would still be storing full quality image files on his phone.

Upgrade his software and turn on iCloud photos and the amount will reduce.

For informational purposes: I do not have iCloud Photos Beta turned on because I thought that counts against your iCloud storage space, correct? I have a fairly large iPhoto library and with the beta not working properly for some people I didn't want to accidentally upload too many photos, have Apple tell me all my iCloud space was full and I have to upgrade my plan again, turn beta off and have it delete all my photos because everything's "connected." I do have back ups of these things but it seems like it would be more of a hassle than it is worth.

I personally wish that Apple would let you use iCloud photos and not have it count against your iCloud storage that you pay for ala Amazon and Flickr (I think they have a max of like... a million photos or something crazy?).

 

[lordofthereef]

For informational purposes: I do not have iCloud Photos Beta turned on because I thought that counts against your iCloud storage space, correct?

That's correct. It does. There are other options, though. We recently started using Flickr. Free 1TB space. The only caveat is it doesn't auto-upload videos. You need to do video yourself, and it's a max of 90 seconds.

 

[wolfaaron]

I should have been more clear, none of his videos were over a minute... except one. We found the culprit. It seems he had a TEN MINUTE video basically in the middle of the list that we overlooked. We found it because we took all the photos and videos off and it cleared up all the space.



For informational purposes: I do not have iCloud Photos Beta turned on because I thought that counts against your iCloud storage space, correct? I have a fairly large iPhoto library and with the beta not working properly for some people I didn't want to accidentally upload too many photos, have Apple tell me all my iCloud space was full and I have to upgrade my plan again, turn beta off and have it delete all my photos because everything's "connected." I do have back ups of these things but it seems like it would be more of a hassle than it is worth.

I personally wish that Apple would let you use iCloud photos and not have it count against your iCloud storage that you pay for ala Amazon and Flickr (I think they have a max of like... a million photos or something crazy?).

You can also get OneDrive or Dropbox and use it as extra storage. Google drive is also fairly cheap.