Manage your photo and video storage - Apple Support (2024)

FAQs

Manage your photo and video storage - Apple Support? ›

While 'Optimize iPhone Storage' offers significant benefits, it's not without drawbacks. One key downside is the reliance on an internet connection to access full-resolution images stored in iCloud, which can be inconvenient in areas with poor connectivity.

While 'Optimize iPhone Storage' offers significant benefits, it's not without drawbacks. One key downside is the reliance on an internet connection to access full-resolution images stored in iCloud, which can be inconvenient in areas with poor connectivity.

If you want to transfer Photos from iPhone to iCloud and keep them only on iCloud, you have to disable iCloud Photos and remove them from iPhone. To manage iPhone storage, you can delete photos from iPhone but not iCloud to make more room for other files.

When Optimize Storage is turned on, full-resolution photos and videos are stored in iCloud, and, when needed, space-saving copies are stored on your device. And as long as you have enough space in iCloud, you can store as many photos and videos as you want.

You can use Google Photos to save space on your device when you delete photos that are safely backed up. Before you use this feature, you must ensure that you've already backed up your photos properly.

All of your full-resolution photos and videos are then transferred over to your iCloud, while smaller, lower-resolution versions are kept on your device, to take up less space.

Your storage might actually be occupied by your operating system, so you may need to uninstall some apps to make more room. If this doesn't work, you can also use a cleaner app to free up some space on your phone.

If your device storage is full and can't free up space, you might get a Storage Almost Full alert. If you see this alert, check the storage recommendations or offload some less-used content like videos and apps.

A: By default, deleting photos from your iPhone will not delete them from iCloud. However, if you have enabled iCloud Photos (previously known as iCloud Photo Library), deleting a photo from your iPhone will also remove it from iCloud and all other devices connected to your iCloud account.

Why is my iCloud storage full after deleting everything? ›

iCloud Backup: If you have iCloud Backup enabled, your device may be backing up other data like app data, device settings, and messages. Even if you delete photos, the backup might include other data that takes up space.

If you delete from either place (iCloud Photos or your iPhone), the syncing feature deletes the photo in the other place. The only way to keep a photo on the iPhone while deleting it from iCloud is to turn off the automatic syncing.

Unable to save photos and videos

If you go over your storage limit, iCloud will stop uploading new images from your devices to the cloud. Any photos or videos already stored in iCloud will remain available. But new ones will only save locally on your device until you upgrade or delete data.

The way to remove data on iCloud is by heading to Settings> Apple ID> iCloud> Manage Storage> iCloud Drive. Then you can access all data stored on iCloud Drive. Next, swipe left and hit on the trash icon to delete the file. And this is how to clear up iCloud storage without deleting photos.

So here's a quick guide: 1000 10K pictures would be about 1GB. 1000 1GB pictures would be about 1000GB.

So, which one you should choose mostly depends on what you care about most. If your device does not have enough space, then the "Optimize iPhone Storage" should be your prior choice while you can choose the "Download and Keep Originals" if your iPhone comes in a very large capacity.

If you use iCloud Photos, you can turn on Optimize Mac Storage to conserve storage space on your Mac. This option stores smaller versions of your photos on your Mac when storage space is limited, and keeps the original, full-size photos in iCloud.

Open the “Photos” app and tap on “Albums.” Select “Videos” or “Recently Deleted” to delete unwanted videos or permanently remove deleted photos. To optimize storage, enable the “Optimize iPhone Storage” option in “Settings” > “Photos” & “Camera.” This will save space by storing high-resolution versions in iCloud.

How to Increase the Resolution of an Image on iPhone. Go to Settings > Camera > Formats to change your resolution from 12 MP to 24 MP. To change it to 48 MP, go to Settings > Camera > Formats, then turn on RAW or Resolution Control.