I have an iPhone 16 with 256 GB of storage, and it's nearly full at 250 GB. A whopping 140 GB is taken up by my photos, and I'm looking for advice on how to transfer these photos to my laptop. Is there an effective way to back them up to the cloud so I can delete them from my iPhone? Also, if I delete them from the phone, will the photos remain in the cloud until I decide to manually delete them? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
3 Answers
How much iCloud storage do you currently have? Ideally, you should have enough storage to fit your entire photo library. With ‘Optimize Storage’ on, you can manage your photos without losing access to them.
140 GB for photos is quite a bit! That's around 50,000 to 100,000 photos if they're at average resolution. Are all of them necessary, or could you clean out some duplicates or less important shots? Sometimes dealing with the problem at the source can free up a lot of space right away.
It’s mostly around 3000 videos, with many being in 4K resolution.
It sounds like you've got a lot of space taken up by apps too; maybe check which apps are using space and delete any you don't need. You can sync photos to iCloud and enable 'Optimize Storage' to save some space, but remember if you delete them from your iPhone, it will delete them from iCloud as well. Just make sure to back them up first!
The other storage is mostly small apps like YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit. I'm syncing, but I wasn't sure about the deletion issue.
I have 2TB through family sharing for iCloud.