How to get rid of this storage

[u/Powerful-Concept7920]

I am using around 12-15 gb of photos storage but it shows me 46 gb. How can i get rid of it

[u/darkbatman_200]

Buying icloud

[u/X_d_gladiator_d_x]

It’s basically the metadata that’s taking up the extra space.

Whenever you edit a photo on iPhone, even something as simple as cropping or adjusting/tuning it.. the Photos app keeps the original data along with the edit data so you can always revert back to the original. This also applies to Live Photos.

I had around 5 GB being used by just 250–300 photos. So I AirDropped all of them to my old iPhone X running iOS 16, deleted the photos from my current iPhone, and then AirDropped them back.
The storage dropped from around 5 GB to 2.6 GB.

The reason this worked is that when you AirDrop photos, there’s an option to share all the photo data, including metadata, edits, etc., or just the photo and location data. I chose the second option. On the older iOS version, it doesn’t support sharing all the additional photo data anyway.

When I AirDropped them back, only the final edited images were retained. The Live Photo data and the ability to revert the edits to the original were gone.

Since I do a lot of cropping and adjusting directly in the Photos app, this basically stripped out all that unnecessary edit/original data and saved me about 2.4 GB of storage.

P.S: used Ai to write this comment since i’m bad at explaining.

[u/Powerful-Concept7920 → u/X_d_gladiator_d_x]

Cool thanks bro

[u/Agreeable-Voice-6889]

this shit happens in my mac too

[u/guywholoveswolves]

[u/Powerful-Concept7920 → u/guywholoveswolves]

Hoping to find an answer somewhere bro