What is the size of your Photos library on your iOS devices?

[swandy]

My wife would like me to put our entire photo library in iCloud so that she can look at everything on her iPhone and iPad. Right now I have a small portion (around 4500 photos and videos) and on my iPhone 8 it says it takes up 555MB for the Photos App PLUS 4.66 GB for the Photo Library.

Our FULL photo library (that I keep on my iMac) is over 75000 Photos and Videos. So trying to get an idea - from anyone who has a large photo library and stores it all in iCloud Photo Library - how much room does it take up on your iOS devices?

 

[techiegirl]

My iPhone says it’s used up 4.22 gigs of photos on my phone. I have 25k photos on iCloud taking up 140 gigs on my cloud. Not sure if that makes sense.

 

[DNichter]

22GB on my iCloud Photo Library

 

[iSayBoourns]

Your library will take up what it is on your iCloud storage.

The storage used will highly depend on the amount of photos viewed (especially when using the optimized storage option)

On the device it won’t download a full res copy until you view it. It only stores a small thumbnail until then (which is why you have the example of the second poster with 4.22gb used for photos on device while the actual library is 140gb in iCloud.)

No one can answer how much your library will consume on your phone, because it’s all dependant on how many you view.

 

[eoblaed]

I don't use iCloud storage for my photos.

Right now, on my iOS device, I have 81.97GB of photos
My Photos library on my iMac is sitting at 402GB (well, it's sitting on a direct attached Promise Pegasus2 R4).


I usually keep the last couple of years worth of photos/videos on my phone along with some specific albums. This is the use case that works best for me. I know it doesn't apply to the question of 'how much space does a fully iCloud-ified photo library consume on your phone), but just thought I'd throw some numbers out there for the size of my specific libraries.

 

[Arni99]

2800 photos and 90 videos - about 20 GB.
50GB iCloud plan for 0,99 €/month.
Optimized with low res on iPhone and full res in iCloud - about 600MB on the iPhone but I prefer full res on iPhone .

 

[ImBuz]

My wife would like me to put our entire photo library in iCloud so that she can look at everything on her iPhone and iPad. Right now I have a small portion (around 4500 photos and videos) and on my iPhone 8 it says it takes up 555MB for the Photos App PLUS 4.66 GB for the Photo Library.

Our FULL photo library (that I keep on my iMac) is over 75000 Photos and Videos. So trying to get an idea - from anyone who has a large photo library and stores it all in iCloud Photo Library - how much room does it take up on your iOS devices?

Who in the world is ever going to take a second look at 75000 photos

 

[xxray]

7.1GB on iCloud. That's only pictures/videos from the past year and half though

 

[nilk]

123,000+ photos, 267 videos. In total, it's over 500GB.

On my iPhone 7 for Photos:
Documents & Data: 13GB
Photo Library: 65GB

I don't know what the two different values mean. Maybe Documents & Data are the thumbnails and metadata? And Photo Library is whatever photos/video I have full versions of on the device?

The strange thing is it's saying 53GB out of 128GB for total storage used, so this doesn't add up. I think it's not considering the 65GB Photo Library in that count from what I'm seeing.

Warning: iCloud Photos can be very buggy to get started with. Don't be surprised if you have problems. It was a struggle for me to get it setup, with many false starts and redos (including manually deleting my entire collection so I can retry because their delete collection doesn't really delete the collection). And I can't even get my wife's Aperture collection (nearly 1TB) to even load in Photos to even attempt to load her collection into iCloud Photos (I've tried all kinds of things). Going to try that again in High Sierra.

At the very least, definitely do repair of your collection before you attempt to load into iCloud Photos. If you have any files that Photos can't read, delete them out of your collection.

I haven't experienced any bugs once I got everything into it iCloud Photos, though, and I wouldn't go back to not having my photos in the cloud (though I am going to look at Google Photos and the new Adobe Lightroom CC to compare).

Also note that HEVC/HEIF doesn't work with Sierra, so may want to stick with JPG / H.264 on your iPhone until you're ready to upgrade to High Sierra.

(only started storing videos in my main collection once I started using iCloud Photos, before I would load them directly into FCP X)

 

[eoblaed]

Who in the world is ever going to take a second look at 75000 photos

The nice thing is that with the new-ish deep learning, it's becoming easier and easier to find stuff out of a large collection of photos. When I want to show someone pics of my Malamutes, I can just hit the search thing in the photo app and type 'dog', and there's pics of them going all the way back to when they were puppies.

So, it's unlikely anyone will go back and look at 75k photos, but having a library that is searchable means you can often find a specific pic, or set of pics, from that large library at a moment's notice.

Pretty cool.

 

[MarkB786]

For me, 67,000 photos = 68 GB

 

[BigMcGuire]

I have used Google Photos for all my pictures because of the massive amount of photos that I have. My old 16GB iPhones could never hold all the photos and iCloud wouldn't let me offset them back in the day to cloud only. So I went to Google Photos.

I have 96,341 photos and videos in Google Photos - about 93GB even at Google's compressed rate.

I got my 8+ September 26 2017, and I've taken 785 photos so far as of Oct 19 2017. And this takes up 2.6GB on my iPhone right now. Since I have a 256GB iPhone, I will probably not delete photos anytime soon.


Now, not all these are photos. I do a fair amount of screenshotting, etc... I use my phone as an accessory to my brain to help me remember stuff. And I use DayOne to journal - so that and Google Photos reminding me of photos on this day in the past, it's a lot of fun to look back on them.

For my family's birthdays, I can type in the person's name and get access to all the photos I've taken over the last 20 years. We have had a tradition in my family, I post a ton of photos throughout the years of X person on their birthday in our family chat. It's a huge hit.

Like others stated, with Google's increased searching algorithm support, I can search anything and it will find all the photos I've ever taken with that subject -- calculator, fire, red, bird, cellphone, screenshot... And I can quickly type in any day in my past and have a REALLY good idea of what happened on that day specifically because of all the photos I take. I take about 800-1200 photos a month (more this month because I just got my 8+).


I store my photos in my iTunes as a backup. Google Photos are backed up on 3 different hardrives in 2 different locations several times a year. OneDrive and Amazon Prime Photos also backs up my photos and I turned on iCloud backup with my 8+ purchase (I got 200GB for iCloud family for $3/mo).

 

[Juansito]

33gb 3410, 669 are videos

 

[Tom G.]

About 3.5 K Photos of which 1.2 K are of my dog Molly. People ask me if I have a photo of Molly when I'm boring them with stories of her, and I tell them, "No, I don't have A photo of her, I have over a thousand photos of her."

 

[profets]

A lot of variables will come into play, such as amount of storage space on the device, how many photos have been taken since using the device, favourites, etc.

I have 45000 photos + 3000 videos in my iCloud Photo Library. About 350GB right now. When I used a 128GB iPhone for the past year it slowly accumulated about 60-70GB of space on the device. Past month I’ve been using a 64GB iPhone and current local storage used by photos is 20GB. It’ll change based on local storage needs, photos being taken, photos viewed, etc.

Who in the world is ever going to take a second look at 75000 photos

My photo library goes back to the year 2000. Very often I find myself scrolling back through old photos/albums, or digging something up to show someone. I was at an sports event in 2003 that I frequently pull up photos when showing people.

And it’s not just about having it on the phone. I have access through the native Photos app on any device - iPhone, iPad and iMac. I love being able to browse photos and memories on a large screen like the iPad or iMac.

 

[mazdamiata210]

195 MB... It's a phone not a camera.

 

[sumsingwong]

I don't use iCloud because I use both iOS and Android. I use Flickr which gives me 1tb free. The app auto uploads from all my devices. I keep my collection to worthy (to me and family).

 

[sdwaltz]

70gb for me.

15,655 photos, 600 videos. All are synced on my phone, iPad, and iCloud.

 

[wxnats]

31 GB in iCloud

 

[kevroc]

I just started a project like this a few weeks ago, bought an old 2010 MacBook just for this purpose (I’m on Windows). So far I’ve published 7 years of photos and I’m at 77gb which is 7764 photos. I’m doing 1 year at a time and so far have found the process to be awesome, loving iCloud Photo’s. I’ve already been using it to look up photos on my phone using keyword searching and it works great.

 

[kevroc]

I have used Google Photos for all my pictures because of the massive amount of photos that I have. My old 16GB iPhones could never hold all the photos and iCloud wouldn't let me offset them back in the day to cloud only. So I went to Google Photos.

I have 96,341 photos and videos in Google Photos - about 93GB even at Google's compressed rate.

Now, not all these are photos. I do a fair amount of screenshotting, etc... I use my phone as an accessory to my brain to help me remember stuff. And I use DayOne to journal - so that and Google Photos reminding me of photos on this day in the past, it's a lot of fun to look back on them.
.

Quick question for you if you don’t mind. When you uploaded all of those photos, did you have to manually categorize them in any way. What’s kept me from Google Photos is having manually recreate all of my Folders which basically holds photos by “year\event” format.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Quick question for you if you don’t mind. When you uploaded all of those photos, did you have to manually categorize them in any way. What’s kept me from Google Photos is having manually recreate all of my Folders which basically holds photos by “year\event” format.

Nope, just uploaded them via my phone or my camera when I used to use one years ago. Google would classify them by date and that was good enough for me. A few times I would make albums especially if I was sharing photos, but other than that, they’re all in there as is. Google organizes them by year, month, date - day by day. This has worked for me - but I’ve always been a lazy one when it comes to tagging, folders, etc... especially when it came to photos because I took so many.

With Google’s search getting smarter and smarter - this works really well with my massive collection of photos - searching for stuff almost always turns up results - and I spend a lot of time with my photos. But I’ve been using Google Photos for a very long time (since it started).

Before that I had them in a Dropbox folder where it was difficult to find stuff, I almost never did anything with them other than post a few on Flickr back in the day. It wasn’t until I got Google Photos with its smarter search (recently) that I’ve found going through my photos a rewarding experience.

 

[nilk]

195 MB... It's a phone not a camera.

Kinda funny opinion to have in 2017 (or in this entire decade for that matter). But in any case, I take many photos with my DSLR camera, load them into Apple Photos, and through iCloud I have them available on all my devices including my... phone. My photo library includes all my digital photos since my very first digital camera in 2003, all in iCloud Photos, all accessible from my phone.

 

[DNichter]

I've changed my mindset on storage a lot since last year. I purchased a 256GB 7 Plus with the idea that I need to store ALL my music and photos on it (still stream Plex from my NAS). I have found that I really have no use for it though and I would have to imagine that most people don't either. Apple has done a really nice job of not making storage a big deal anymore. The 64GB X is plenty for me actually. I use iCloud Music/Photo Library, set both settings at optimize storage, and leave it alone. It works really well when you don't think about it.

 

[nilk]

I've changed my mindset on storage a lot since last year. I purchased a 256GB 7 Plus with the idea that I need to store ALL my music and photos on it (still stream Plex from my NAS). I have found that I really have no use for it though and I would have to imagine that most people don't either. Apple has done a really nice job of not making storage a big deal anymore. The 64GB X is plenty for me actually. I use iCloud Music/Photo Library, set both settings at optimize storage, and leave it alone. It works really well when you don't think about it.

I had the same change in mindset recently, and was previously always buying the largest storage option. Once you buy into iCloud and cloud/streaming services, your on-device storage becomes mostly cache. So when choosing the storage size you're just picking how much cache you want.

I'm happy to pay for cloud storage for the benefits I get. Apple's pricing is very competitive at $10/month for 2TB that you can share across your family (of course with the limitations of what devices iCloud storage can be used on).