SOLVED: Photos App Consuming All Disk Space

[mslilyelise]

Hey all. Running iPadOS 18 on my iPad 8 and unfortunately I have the tiny 32GB storage version. Prior to updating to 18.1 it would sync a couple GBs of my photos and leave the rest in the cloud, but after the update, Photos is filling the whole storage space with photos (downloading like 9GB of photos) and then the OS is complaining about the space being full. Did something change in the settings for the Photos app that makes it download more from iCloud library, and can I turn that setting down or off? I’ve disabled Photos syncing to regain my disk space but that’s not an ideal solution. Thanks for any help. 💖

 

[rui no onna]

Double check that you have iCloud Photos set to "Optimize iPad Storage" and not "Download and Keep Originals".

If you have Optimize enabled, it may just be some initial setup related to the iOS 18 updates to the Photos app (probably re-scanning images for people, pets, landmarks, etc). Leave your iPad charging overnight for a few days and it'll probably go back to normal once it's done with indexing.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Once the storage is full - iCloud can't sync, so it becomes a REAL problem.

If you've disabled iCloud sync and removed ALL photos from the iPad, try turning it on again & see if it'll sync properly.

 

[mslilyelise]

Found the issue, and the issue was me, but wanted to post just in case anyone else comes across this problem.

Somehow, I had disabled Photos as a service on my iCloud account. May have been while I was trying to troubleshoot, may have been me being a tottering old fool. But whatever the reason, the iPad storage kept filling up because my iCloud account was pushing the whole photo library into any device that connected to the account in preparation for the cloud portion to delete in 30 days. Once I enabled Photos in iCloud, and wiped the iPad and started with a fresh install, we're back to normal behaviour, which is 2GB or so of photos synced and the rest in cloud.

So if this ever happens to you, log in to iCloud.com on the web and check to see if your Photo Library feature is turned off.