Storage usage for Photos

[boston04and07]

So I have both my iPhone and iPad syncing all my Aperture photos via iTunes, and noticed something odd today. In iTunes, the storage usage for my iPhone is reading as 15.57 GB for 5724 photos. For my iPad, the same sync settings are reading as only 8.57 GB for 12254 photos. My Aperture library on my Mac is reading as 47 GB total. It doesn't look like I'm missing anything in either library. Has anyone ever had an issue like that? Not sure what's going on...

 

[TJ61]

When you sync photos with iTunes, Apple chooses the resolution for you. It's because they think we're. Simple.

 

[zorinlynx]

When you sync photos with iTunes, Apple chooses the resolution for you. It's because they think we're. Simple.

I'm actually surprised the iPad uses less space for more photos, since the iPad has a higher resolution than the iPhone. WTF?

 

[TJ61]

I'm actually surprised the iPad uses less space for more photos, since the iPad has a higher resolution than the iPhone. WTF?

Well, I wouldn't necessarily take the OP's numbers at face value. The iPhone #'s as reported come out to 2.7MB per photo (fairly reasonable, though maybe a little high), whereas the iPad #'s work out to 0.7MB per photo (much too low).

FWIW, syncing an 8MP photo to either my iPad mini 1st gen or my 5S reduces resolution to 3MP. The one photo I looked at was 1.7MB in size, compared to 4.8MB for the original.

 

[Menneisyys2]

Well, I wouldn't necessarily take the OP's numbers at face value. The iPhone #'s as reported come out to 2.7MB per photo (fairly reasonable, though maybe a little high), whereas the iPad #'s work out to 0.7MB per photo (much too low).

FWIW, syncing an 8MP photo to either my iPad mini 1st gen or my 5S reduces resolution to 3MP. The one photo I looked at was 1.7MB in size, compared to 4.8MB for the original.

Regrettably, it's not only the reduced target resolution that counts. Basically, iTunes adds a VERY large, uncompressed thumbnail to all images to allow for quick previews. This is the problem.

I've posted a lot of info on this issue. An except from my dedicated Q2 2012 article (no link as it'd be an external one):

"In the last few days, I've participated in several discussion threads in the Phone Cameras / Tablets & Apps forum of DPReview. In order not to have to repeat the same facts again and again in future discussions, I've decided to dedicate a complete article to the question of using the iPad as a photo frame.

I frequently travel around the World and, during this, I take tens of thousands of shots. (No, don't think of anything artistic, I'm “only” a point-and-shooter that want to record what he sees.) After throwing away the worst shots, I still generally have thousands of pics of every new town I visit. As I like showing my travel shots to both friends and in the family, I tend to keep them on my 64-Gbyte iPad 3, which, thanks to the high-resolution and high-quality screen, is perfectly suited to function as a photo frame.

Not so Apple's own tools, iTunes on the desktop (the app you MUST use to transfer photos to the stock Photos app on the iPad), when photo synching works at all (sometimes not even it does), greatly increases the size of the transferred photos.

1. Almost three times the original size?!

Just an example. I've kept some 3900 shots I've shot in Pisa, Italy, this March. In order to be able to shoehorn them into my iPad 3, I've decided to reduce their quality to around 50%. Then, they only take 300-900 kbytes each but still are of acceptable quality even when “pixel peeping”, that is, fully zooming in to the pixel level. The entire image library only takes up exactly 3 Gbytes on my desktop computer. How much storage do you think it takes up on my iPad 3? Almost three times(!) more: 8.1 Gbytes. All this because of the added thumbnails.

Why the size increase? you may ask. So that the iPad can very quickly display all thumbnails of all the pics at the bottom image slider and when you turn to the next image (or select an image from the slider), it could present an image not needing decompression / decoding. As you may have guessed, decompressed images can be HUGE. Yes, all this is done so that even the first iPad could really quickly navigate the synchronized (and, for that matter, via the Apple's Camera Connection Kit, imported) pics.

Can this alll be disabled? Nope. As a rule of thumb, if you do use iTunes for synchronization, you cannot get rid of this size increase, not even via CCK “hacking” or emulation. This will be discussed in the next subsection."