iPhone 12 Pro why downloading ALL photos?

[Dhonk]

My wife got her iPhone 12 pro today. She got 128GB. Her old iPhone 11 Pro was 256GB, but she was only using about 70GB. When we set up the iPhone 12, it says the storage is full. Looking at it, her phone has downloaded 70GB worth of photos, whereas her old one was only using like 8 GB, with the rest just thumbnails and better versions in iCloud. How do we go about fixing this issue?

 

[glenthompson]

Settings-AppleId-iCloud-Photos-Optimize iPhone storage. That keeps thumbnails on the phone and full resolution in iCloud.

 

[Dhonk]

That is selected. For some reason though it's almost like it's initially trying to download them all, then upload them back to the cloud. But there isn't room for them all

 

[akash.nu]

Are you restoring from an iCloud backup?

 

[Caesars]

Nice little trick by Apple to get us to pay for iCloud and a larger hard drive.

 

[ericwn]

Nice little trick by Apple to get us to pay for iCloud and a larger hard drive.

A splendid theory. Never happened to me yet so I have my doubts. May as well be a bug. I’d contact Apple just in case.

 

[Dhonk]

Are you restoring from an iCloud backup?

No, we transferred from her old phone.

 

[akash.nu]

No, we transferred from her old phone.

So doesn’t that old phone backup to iCloud or has iCloud sync turned on for photos?

 

[Dhonk]

Good news, after about 48 hours her new phone is now showing only 60 GB used. This is what I was hoping, but I thought maybe it hit a bottle neck that needed resolving. Like normal indexing it resolved on its own