iCloud Photos taking up local space

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iCloud Photos taking up local space

I have the 2020 iPad Air, and I recently bought the 2TB iCloud subscription as to free up some space, considering my iPad can only hold 64GB total. My GoodNotes app had initially been using 20GB of local storage, but thanks to the iCloud upgrade, it dropped to 5GB. This is good. This is what I wanted.

But now my Photos app is taking up a whole 12GB of storage?

Before, I used to back up all my photos on Google Photos and kept fewer than 100 photos stored locally on my iPad at any given time. When I got the 2TB iCloud subscription, I figured I might as well move everything from Google Photos to Apple Photos since it'll all be on the cloud anyway.

But considering my Photos app used to only take up 2GB, it feels like a huge waste for it to now be using 12GB. I do have 28,000 photos and 6,000 videos, but I would’ve thought that iCloud was supposed to free up space — not take up more.

I even have the setting "Optimize iPad Storage" turned on.

So how can I free up this unnecessary space? I don’t need low-res versions of my photos downloaded to my iPad without Wi-Fi — that doesn’t benefit me in any way. Is there really no way to reduce the storage the Photos app is taking up?

Posted on Jul 5, 2025 10:22 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 6, 2025 11:30 AM in response to Malcolmxcx

What is the size of your Photos Library on iCloud. An "Optimized" library may take up less than 10% of the full Library size.

Keep in mind that iCloud is not intended to be used like an external hard drive-- it provides a particular service, a way to synchronize Photos and files on different devices. If you don't need the synchronization among several devices, iCloud may not be useful to you.

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