Archiving iPhone Photos to Regain Space

If you've just recently turned on Optimize Storage for the photos, I'd let it run like that for a while and see if there are issues. You can always grab the full quality versions from the cloud account, and the phone should continue to off-load infrequently accessed photos and videos as needed to ensure enough free working space.

I just use “Optimize“ storage myself, and I have a rather large library, and a lower-capacity phone, but…

You could move your older images to a second photos library and store that on your iCloud drive. I have several such libraries for events where a group of us “pooled” photos and another of various images collected over the years.

It all starts by holding the OPTION key down while you open Photos on the Mac. A Photos Library manager application will make moving images to the “external” library easier.

EDIT TO ADD This only works if there‘s a Macintosh available. I have no suggestions for “pulling the images” off the iPhone because the library on my iPhone is not, and never has been, the definitive repository.

Here is some context of what an 'end state' might look like with a reload of the phone after getting everything into iCloud.

I have 115,000 photos and 11,000 videos totaling about 600 GB (on my Mac). On my iPhone (14 Pro Max 512GB if it matters) I can see and access everything and it takes up 31.78GB. With Wifi or a decent cell connection the delay to see high resolution images or play videos can be perceptible, but not an issue. i.e. sharing vacation photos and videos with the grandparents via an AppleTV. With 1 bar of LTE sorts of marginal situations your catalogue can be viewed, but only the low resolution versions.

I've basically just let the algorithm do its thing and it's been fine. Good luck!

Just buy more iCloud storage space. The archiving workflow you are describing seems lke a huge pain in the ass to me, plus it bifurcates her photo library. There should only be one monolithic photo collection on her devices, 24/7, compromised solely of keepers. Why be forced to access an archive on a Windows PC if you want to look at photos of a certain age?

I would suspect that the real problem here, like it is for almost everyone, isn't storage space or an archiving workflow, but that half of her photos are bad/redundant and should be deleted outright.

papadage said:

So, what option do I have to create an archive of older photos? Ideally, I would want software on my PC (Win 11 Pro) that could connect to her iPhone with a wired connection, pull all images older than a specific date, save them in folders named after the year and month they were taken, and number them sequentially.

So, questions:

• What's a good software package that would allow me to do that with her pics?
• Does this software keep the metadata intact so it can be used to search (location, date, etc)

Click to expand...

By any chance do you have access to a Mac? As far as exporting with the naming conventions you mentioned, I think Photos on Mac would be your best free bet. Other than that, I can only think of Adobe Lightroom. Both would preserve metadata.

There might be some free utilities that can do something similar. On Mac, I’d try NameChanger, but I’m not sure what the Windows equivalent could be.

If you know PowerShell, I would bet you could write your own script to do the sorting for you (I don’t, but I can imagine how I’d do it in AppleScript).

papadage said:

• Do I need to delete some apps to free up some room and then deactivate optimization so the phone pulls down the hi-res versions of the pics, or is it too late and I am stuck with the current quality of the pics on the phone?

Click to expand...

So, any time you’re connected to the Internet and open a photo, it should download the full-res versions. Since it sounds like the bulk of your wife’s library is recent, my guess would be that it would have no problem downloading all of the full resolution photos once it has offloaded the bulk.

I would suggest selecting the photos you want to archive, hit the Share button, then “Export Unmodified Originals.” Save those to iCloud, zip them, log on on the PC and download locally, then sort and archive.

You guys are making this WAY more complicated than it needs to be.

It’s valid to address the specific question the author has. You can throw more money at anything to fix it if that’s all you care about.

ant1pathy said:

If you've just recently turned on Optimize Storage for the photos, I'd let it run like that for a while and see if there are issues. You can always grab the full quality versions from the cloud account, and the phone should continue to off-load infrequently accessed photos and videos as needed to ensure enough free working space.

Click to expand...

Seconded. It took a few weeks for the savings to really kick in on my phone.

Well, then I'd say, stay simple. Upgrade the iCloud storage, per VH

papadage said:

Look, Vincent Hanna is correct. Her phone is full of junk and redundant photos.

However, the issue with culling photos is that my wife has tens of thousands of unread emails in her work inbox alone. She is excellent at her job, but filing and organization are not things she does. She will not go through her Inbox.

So I need an archive solution or a way to force the iPhone to optimize faster to free up space. She only has 3 GB or so free out of 512, making the phone act funny. And she can't update iOS either due to the lack of space.

Click to expand...

I was going to say that 3GB should be plenty of free space for things to shuffle around, but I think the "rule" is twice the RAM capacity as a good starting point so you're not there yet. And unless those emails have attachments, all tens of thousands of them are probably less storage than a single full-res photo.

A trick that works sometimes (used to?) is to download a large app (Pages / Numbers / Keynote / Garage Band are good choices) to "force" the phone to eject some more stuff to clear the space, then delete the apps afterwards.

And from OPs reading it's phone storage space that's out, not cloud space.

papadage said:

The email Inbox was another example of her not culling content. The work inbox is not on her iPhone, so the space it takes is not an issue.

And yes, I have a ton of iCloud storage available. We still have almost 2/3 of the family plan's 2TB free.

I like your idea of downloading and deleting a large app to force more optimization.

Click to expand...

If you want to really push it, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is apparently 10gb (according to the store page), which is 20x Pages’ size.

The iPhone is a PTP device; you can use any PTP aware application (even Windows Explorer) to copy images off of it. You can then use any software you want to organize the images. Lightroom, ACDSee, etc. You don't need those programs to import (Explorer can do it) but Explorer's PTP routines are hot trash.

That said, Image Capture on the Mac has been the most reliable way to copy (but not organize) the files.

kefkafloyd said:

That said, Image Capture on the Mac has been the most reliable way to copy (but not organize) the files.

Click to expand...

Once the files were pulled there are utilities that will move the images into folders by creation date — per the OP’s wishes. I have one such app on my MacBook, but can’t recall the name at the moment. Will dig it up (tomorrow) on request. Better File Renamer would take care of the sequential naming of the image files.

However, as File Optimization has now been turned on, there is no guarantee that the image files are resident on the phone. I’d export the images from the iCloud Library. (To do this I’d use my iMac, which is already set up to download all images to Photos.)

papadage said:

And yes, I have a ton of iCloud storage available. We still have almost 2/3 of the family plan's 2TB free.

Click to expand...

Then why not just let her iCloud Photo Library sync to all the free space on the family plan? There's no way the optimized footprint on the phone would then be over 100GB. What is the actual photo footprint on the phone currently as per Settings > iPhone Storage?

I use Mac's Image Capture app to pull down new media from an iPhone, then delete a batch of the oldest photos. Same thing can be done using Photos app.

It's not as automated as iCloud, but in case of the need to restore it can be done a lot faster. It also provides an option to search images not stored on iPhone anymore.

papadage said:

But I could install the iCloud software and export from the web.

Click to expand...

No need to install anything. Just go to iCloud.com and log in with her Apple ID

I am confused.

Your only Mac is work-issued, doesn’t allow Apple ID logins, yet you have a family iCloud account with 2TB of space?

Does your wife have a Mac? Or are you both the kind of insane people with personal iPhones but Windows PCs?

What is the true, unoptimized footprint of her entire photo library? It has to be under 450GB if it all fits on her 512GB iPhone. Optimization should bring that down to under 100GB easy. Problem solved.

I think we're all getting a little lost in the weeds, including our OP.

Vincent Hanna said:

Or are you both the kind of insane people with personal iPhones but Windows PCs?

Click to expand...

I get that you were just being cheeky, but given how many iPhones are sold versus how few (comparatively) Macs are sold, this is actually the vast majority of people who own both an iPhone and a personal computer. We're all approaching this from our Apple-ecosystem-centric-worldview here in the Ach where we have both an iPhone and a Mac, both signed into iCloud, both using iCloud Photos, with one set to optimize storage and one set to download originals for safe keeping (because, as we all know, iCloud Photos is not a backup, it is a mirror). A lot about iCloud is stupid and barely functional, but iCloud Photos is genuinely effortless. That is, if you're using a Mac with your iPhone.

Papadage, I understand you have access to a personal Windows PC? Or your wife does? If so, this Apple Knowledge Guide article explains how to automatically download the full-res original photos and videos that have been synced to iCloud from an iOS device onto a Windows PC, essentially duplicating the setup that is "built in" for us using an iPhone with a Mac.

As for the time it's taking your wife's iPhone to reduce the amount of storage her photos are using, it may very well take a long time. If her photos weren't already uploaded to iCloud, it needs to upload all 450GB+ and create the proxy versions that stay on her phone. That's network and computationally intensive. As a result, iOS is conservative about when it will work on this in the background, starting and stopping as the phone is on wifi and while plugged in. Give it time. Much like syncline indicated in his message, the space savings are dramatic, but it's not instantaneous, especially given the volume of images we're talking about.

It's also important to note that iCloud Photos will automatically download the full-res version of a photo or video if you attempt to edit, share, or otherwise access it on a device where optimize storage is enabled. It's not like your wife loses access to her originals, it's that there's now an automatic sync process that occurs.

cateye - I was indeed being cheeky, and I am well aware that the majority of iPhones are owned by non-Mac users.

Papadage - It's hard to give advice without a full accounting of you and your wife's hardware and iCloud settings. And your description of your wife's work email not being on her iPhone makes me believe she has a second (Android?) phone. You're starting in the middle of the story.

And another reason optimization is taking so long is that the local iPhone storage is already full, and the drive is thrashing as it attempts to replace full-sized images with the lower rez proxies. Rather than turning on optimization on a device that was already storage starved, you should have cable synced her entire, full-rez Photos library to a Mac (with the same Apple ID) and let it sync to iCloud from there. In other words, just use Apple's iCloud Photo Library the way it is designed to be used and your problem is solved.

papadage said:

I turned on Optimization ten days ago, and her photos and video are still taking up over 400 GB of space.

Click to expand...

Optimize is going to work off of some kind of internal target for how much free space is appropriate. On a 512GB phone, I would anticipate something in the neighborhood of 10-20GB of free space as "reserved". If there's nothing else eating up the space, 400GB of on-phone seems reasonable.

papadage said:

I turned on Optimization ten days ago, and her photos and video are still taking up over 400 GB of space.

I may need to post in the Windows thread. I do have a MacBook Pro, but it’s a work machine that does not allow logins to iCloud, the App Store, or any other AppleID services.

My personal machines are all Windows based.

I can see her photos when I plug the phone into my PC. But they are jumbled in the DCIM folders with no easy separation by time, so I don’t want to just copy them off and delete.

But I could install the iCloud software and export from the web.

Click to expand...

You might also check the "Recently deleted" album on her phone's Photos app. if she has deleted any photos or videos to cleanup, they will stay in that folder for 30 days before being deleted. You can go in there an tell it to delete them which removes the files immediately. its like the trashcan on the desktop.

To free some space short term, you use the online iCloud.com interface to download local copies of some of the larger videos or some less important videos to your PC. Then delete them from Photos and delete them from Recently Deleted. That should force them to be removed from her phone.

I think, assuming that you have enough iCloud storage to hold her photos and they are backed up there, if you log out of iCloud on her phone, it will remove the local copies. then you can login again and it will only download the photos as you access them. It can be a tedious process if she has a lot of files.

It is worth making sure that you have enough iCloud storage on your subscription. We have a family plan and it's not that expensive as an insurance policy.

papadage said:

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have a 2TB family plan; over half is free. My wife uses 588GB, my mother-in-law uses 307GB, and the rest of us (my father-in-law, me, and my two young daughters) are only using 140 GB, combined. I have plenty of space, so I will probably use your suggestion of offloading the videos. That will get her through the fall, and she is due for a new phone when the new ones arrive.

Click to expand...

I would strongly recommend trying the trick of downloading some large apps to jam up the free space and then delete them afterwards first. I'm always tentative about directly deleting photos or videos, too easy to "whoops" and clear them from the master copy and then they're gone. You shouldn't have to be a phone janitor once the Optimize Storage is turned on. It's been a few days, what's the reported free space now?

I've used iMazing in the past to manage my iPhone from Windows. Haven't used the latest version, but it did work well.


Recently had to help clean up my dad's iCloud photo library, and it turns out he had a lot of screenshots taken with his iPad (I've taken a few by mistake too myself), along with some random videos of the floor. Could be worth a look at the Screenshots album on her phone to see if there are inadvertent photos there that could be easily cleared out.

As the others have said, the easiest in the long run would be the photo optimization. Archiving photos just seems like a way to end up with two large photo libraries.