why do random old photos sit on my iPhone taking up space? large library is on iCloud

[madeirabhoy]

wouldn't normally notice this as on my mac of course my iPhone doesnt mount as a disc, but when plugged into office pc it does and i can see the DCIM folder.

my photo library is 8868 pics in iCloud but i have Optimise iPhone storage selected, and often my iPhone is almost completely full so id expect them to virtually all be only on the iCloud.

in settings it tells me my Photos take up 1.42gb which sounds a lot to me, but im guessing 8000 small previews all add up.

however when i plug my phone into the office pc and it pops up as a disc and i go into DCIM i find 500mb of random pics, not ones that have necessarily been taken on the phone, not recent, not ones ive clicked on recently.

am i missing something? can i just deleted them?

 

[iDuel]

iCloud photos doesn’t work that way. All of your photos are still on your device, none are stored excusively in the cloud. The purpose of iCloud is syncing your photos between devices. The previews you are seeing are still the photo files, but just at a lower resolution to conserve space.

 

[madeirabhoy]

iCloud photos doesn’t work that way. All of your photos are still on your device, none are stored excusively in the cloud. The purpose of iCloud is syncing your photos between devices. The previews you are seeing are still the photo files, but just at a lower resolution to conserve space.

thanks but that isn't the point im asking.



i know there are smaller previews of all pictures, which take up space, but arent the whole photos library, as that is 24gb.

what i am saying is out of the 8000 photos in my library, there are maybe 100 pics (maybe more or maybe less as i didnt count) , random, mainly older ones, sitting on my phone. in full size in DCIM folder.

 

[iDuel]

thanks but that isn't the point im asking.



i know there are smaller previews of all pictures, which take up space, but arent the whole photos library, as that is 24gb.

what i am saying is out of the 8000 photos in my library, there are maybe 100 pics (maybe more or maybe less as i didnt count) , random, mainly older ones, sitting on my phone. in full size in DCIM folder.

That's odd...have you recently viewed those specific pictures? I ask because the only reason they would be full size on your phone is if you had viewed them in which case the full resolution would be downloaded and on your phone for a time. Only other thing I can think of is to do a manual upload to the cloud which can be done by scrolling down your photos until you get to the bottom where it says your number of pictures and videos and there should be something that says 'upload'.

 

[scaramoosh]

iCloud sucks but the fanboys still defend it, what is the point in cloud storage if you still need the local storage?

Here is a tip, just use Google Photos and Google Drive, they are far superior and you don't have to zip folders either. Google Photos will automatically upload everything and storage is unlimited...

 

[itsmilo]

iCloud Photo Library always keeps some images that "may be of interest" for you on the phone. The advantage of iCloud Photo Library is that you do not have to think about it. Once your iPhone is running really low on space, it is going to wipe those locally stored images as well.

Those thumbnails do not take up much space. I have 89 GB of photos on iCloud but those thumbnails only take up <600 mb until iCloud downloads some photos locally because I simply have enough space left to warrent it

 

[madeirabhoy]

iCloud Photo Library always keeps some images that "may be of interest" for you on the phone. The advantage of iCloud Photo Library is that you do not have to think about it. Once your iPhone is running really low on space, it is going to wipe those locally stored images as well.

Those thumbnails do not take up much space. I have 89 GB of photos on iCloud but those thumbnails only take up <600 mb until iCloud downloads some photos locally because I simply have enough space left to warrent it

in theory thats correct.

in practice thats not whats happening. i know this for three reasons.

1. my iPhone is a 16gb 6, so im always running out of space, and deleting some apps to replace others. especially since i got my apple watch and ive been filling the phone with apps that will appear on the watch so i can try them. as you say, 89gb of pics takes up less than 600mb for thumbnails and yet i regularly have a situation where my smaller than your, photo library is taking up 1.5gb whilst the phone is telling me theres not enough space to download an app.

2. the pics are ones that are really random. some really old ones ive not looked at in years.

3. i notice when i used to plug my phone in to my mac when i took a pic i then wanted to use for something on my mac (i know i can wait for it to appear in photos) in image capture i would see a few really old pics, the same ones all the time.

 

[cynics]

iCloud sucks but the fanboys still defend it, what is the point in cloud storage if you still need the local storage?

Here is a tip, just use Google Photos and Google Drive, they are far superior and you don't have to zip folders either. Google Photos will automatically upload everything and storage is unlimited...

iCloud Photo Library =/= cloud storage.

While similar in some respects iCloud Photo Library is a specific service. The point of it is to sync all your photos across all your devices, optimize local device storage space and provide a first line type of back up (shouldn't be your only).

You can use Files.app if you want to move data onto your iCloud storage and than remove it from your phone. While this still can use some "other" space on the phone for caching it'll get removed in short order.

 

[ser968]

I have a similar issue. I 'only' went with the 64GB X (I previously had a 256 7) and I have started running low on space, so I decided that I would use Google Photos instead (I love it BTW). As such, I synced my phone with iTunes and unchecked the box to sync with my photo library.

When the sync was done, iTunes showed that my storage did indeed clear, but when I look at the storage used on my iPhone, the photos did not disappear (the iPhone shows 14GB of space taken by photos synced with iTunes). I synced a whole bunch more times, but these photos were not removed.

Does anyone know how to forceably remove photos from an iPhone? I fear that the only way to do this will be to reset the phone, which is something I really do not want to do.

 

[madeirabhoy]

I'm tempted to delete them just by deleting them when plugged into a pc, but I'm not sure if that will mess things up