iPhone Photos app taking up excessive storage despite limited photo count

Question

iPhone Photos app taking up excessive storage despite limited photo count

I’ve been having this issue for months now and I’ve even contacted Apple for help and I still haven’t fixed this issue.

On my iPhone I have about only 52.9GB of storage on my iPhone but on the system it says it’s taking up half up 3/4 pretty much of my storage. In general and in about, it says that I apparently have 12,480 photos on my phone but when it comes to on the app photos, I only have about 1k selfies, 1.k Live Photos, 969 screen shots and 394 portraits. Yes I do have cloud and everything is saved on there but I’m not even able to delete the photos on my iCloud because it doesn’t even give me the option to delete photos, only to manage videos and screenshots, I haven’t been able to even update my phone for months now, like I’m still on iOS 18.1.1, whenever i would hit that 127GB mark, my phone would start to glitch out and not able to respond very well. I’ve been only able to delete videos on my iCloud and photos app but it feels like it isn’t enough, please help!

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Why does my photos take up so much storage when I only have 50 GB yet it takes half of my 128GB storage on my phone

iPhone 15 Pro, iOS 18

Posted on Jul 21, 2025 07:38 PM

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Answer 1

markwmsn

Level 6

16,643 points

Jul 26, 2025 02:44 PM in response to Hector_matu09

Running any iPhone that close to full (127GB or 128GB) can be very dangerous. You ought to be keeping 10% free space all of the time just as a general rule, and more might be needed for major projects like system updates.

You can look at overall storage usage in Settings > General > iPhone Storage. You've already told us that Photos is using nearly half of all the storage on your phone, and we'll talk about that below. The bottom of the list will show large chunks for iOS and System Data. How large are they, and what other chunks are large?

While there isn't a special place in the Photos app to manage specifically photos as there are for videos and screenshots, you should be able to manage them in the long scrolling list of everything in your library. Are you unable to find them there, or unable to delete any of them there?

It sounds like you are already using iCloud Photos. How is your free space there? Operating iCloud Photos without enough free space can also be dangerous to your library.

If you do have enough free space in Cloud AND you can free up enough free space on your phone to operate safely, you might consider enabling the "Optimize iPhone Storage" option on your phone to keep enough free space there. (Enabling it when storage is constrained at either end could lead to unpredictable results.)

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