Please help reduce the Photos cached media disk size on my iPad.

Question

NAT2020 Author

Level 1

15 points

Please help reduce the Photos cached media disk size on my iPad.

Even though optimization is enabled, it always occupies around 13 GB out of 32 GB on my 6th-gen iPad. I don't need all those photos and videos right now — just some of them when I open the app. It feels like this process isn’t managed by the user. And if it's managed by the OS, then why isn't there a safe limit — something like “don’t fill up the entire storage”?

You could suggest simply buying a newer and bigger device, but that’s not an option for me right now.

Because of this, I constantly get the “Storage Full” notification. Even after buying iCloud storage, I can't seem to solve the issue. I saw some suggestions like installing large apps to force iOS to release space, but that seems like a terrible workaround. I can’t open existing apps, can’t access the App Store to install anything new — sometimes I can only do that after restarting the OS.

At the same time, my iPhone 14 Pro (256 GB) handles this iCloud Photo Library fine — about 58 GB used by the Library. The full library size in iCloud is around 2 TB.

iPad, iPadOS 17

Posted on Jul 1, 2025 12:16 PM

Reply

Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,211 points

Jul 3, 2025 1:03 AM in response to NAT2020

The photos.app needs to store at least the small, optimized versions of your photos and videos, so you can see the thumbnails of your photos to select photos. These thumbnails are needed for items in iCloud your Photos Library. Your device with the least storage is the bottleneck, how large your iCloud Photos library can grow.

If you do not want to reduce the size of your iCloud Photos Library, you could use the Shared iCloud Photos Library to prevent the iPad from downloading photos you do not want on the iPad. When you use the shared Library, you have two different iCloud Photos Libraries, a personal Library tied to your Apple Account, and a shared library, available to all that are invited to share it. My suggestion:

Enable the Shared iCloud Photos Library on your iPhone and all devices, where you want to see all photos and videos, but not on your iPad.
Now your iPad will only see your personal iCloud Photos Library.
Move all items you do not need on the iPad from your personal iCloud Photos Library to the Shared library.

It may take a while to sync properly, but this way you are in control which items will be visible to the iPad.

The shared iCloud Photos Library is one of Apple's best new features for Photos iOS, as long as we do not need to use it to share our photos, but perfect, to manage our iCloud Photos Library and split it into two separate libraries on the mobile devices.

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Answer 2

markwmsn

Level 6

16,655 points

Jul 1, 2025 4:40 PM in response to NAT2020

Frankly, the compression ratio you get on your iPhone (2000:58, more than 34:1) is amazing compared to the usual rules of thumb we cite for iCloud Photos on a Mac (5:1 is good, 10:1 is pushing it), and you are asking your iPad to beat that by a further factor of 6.5:1 to over 150:1. Not surprising that it isn't working well.

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Answer 3

NAT2020 Author

Level 1

15 points

Jul 2, 2025 9:51 AM in response to markwmsn

If it’s really based on compression ratio, that’s bad news. Why did the vendor decide to handle it this way? I think local storage usage should be the top priority. Optimization is a paid solution, especially when the company is mainly focused on pushing iCloud sales.

For example, other apps like Telegram give users control — you can configure behavior like “keep data from the last day, month, year,” or “don’t use more than X GB of local storage.”

Anyway, thanks for the fast response.

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Answer 4

NAT2020 Author

Level 1

15 points

Jul 2, 2025 9:54 AM in response to TheAvacado11

It would take months to sort through the media, even with smart albums and similar tools. It’s a family album going back 20 years. Some day later of course I should do this, but no now...

Sharing albums between accounts just creates low-quality duplicates without proper reference links.

Anyway, thanks again for the fast response.

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Answer 5

NAT2020 Author

Level 1

15 points

Jul 2, 2025 9:55 AM in response to muguy

That solution is also on my mind — just not using the Photos app there. But it’s not very convenient when I need to share data between devices.

I didn’t expect the ecosystem to work like this… :( It feels like a toy now.

Anyway, thanks again for the fast response.

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Answer 6

Jul 1, 2025 12:19 PM in response to NAT2020

Have you tried maybe deleting photos? Usually long videos take up a lot of space.

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Answer 7

muguy

Level 10

90,344 points

Jul 1, 2025 12:38 PM in response to NAT2020

A 32 GB iPad isn’t going to handle much of anything, simply not enough space. It’s best to just disable iCloud sync on the iPad and then delete the images.

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