Thanks for sharing all the details — it sounds really confusing, but you’re definitely not alone in this. Here's what likely happened and how you can fix it, explained in simple terms.
When you deleted photos from iCloud.com, those photos were removed from your iCloud account. But since your iPhone had iCloud Photos turned on, your phone was still trying to keep everything in sync with iCloud. At first, it may have looked like nothing changed on your iPhone, but soon after, it started syncing the changes — which likely caused it to re-download some of the photos locally. That’s probably why your phone’s storage went up instead of down.
Then, when you emptied the Recently Deleted folder, it permanently deleted the photos from both your iPhone and iCloud. At this point, your phone was likely downloading high-quality versions of the remaining photos, which can take up a lot of space. This explains why both your iPhone storage stayed high and your iCloud storage started increasing again, even though you had just deleted a lot of photos.
To fix this, the first thing you should do is go to Settings > Photos and make sure “Optimize iPhone Storage” is turned on. This setting helps save space by keeping smaller, low-resolution versions of photos on your phone while the full versions stay in iCloud. If this setting is off, your iPhone will keep the full-size versions, which take up much more space.
Once “Optimize iPhone Storage” is on, your iPhone won’t free up space immediately — it takes time. The phone needs to be plugged into power, connected to Wi-Fi, and left alone for a while to start replacing the big photo files with smaller ones. This process might take a day or two, especially if you have thousands of photos.
It’s important that you don’t manually delete more photos right now. Let the iPhone finish syncing with iCloud on its own. Deleting more photos while the system is still trying to sort things out can make the problem worse.
You can keep an eye on your photo storage by going to Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Photos. It might still show a high number at first, but once the optimization starts working, you should see that number go down gradually.
If after a couple of days the storage is still too high, you can try turning off iCloud Photos temporarily. When prompted, choose “Remove from iPhone” (not “Download”). This will clear out local copies. After a short wait, you can turn iCloud Photos back on, and your phone will start downloading only the smaller, optimized versions. Just make sure everything is already backed up to iCloud before doing this step.
In short, what you’re seeing is your phone trying to keep up with the changes from iCloud. It might take a little time, but if you enable “Optimize iPhone Storage” and stay connected to Wi-Fi, your storage should gradually go back down to normal.
