3400 photos on iPhone taking up 20GB?

[agriffith14]

Can anyone explain to me why my Photos library is 17GB when I only have some 3400 pictures and videos in it? I have maybe two or three home videos over ten minutes and my other videos (definitely <50ish) are all around a minute in length. I don't use live photos. This just baffles me, as my Photos library is nearly 20 GB on both my iPhone and my MacBook air and it's taking up a considerable chunk of space on both of them. How in the WORLD do I find out why it's like this? It's driving me ******* crazy. Thanks for your help!

I have a four-month old iPhone 6S after upgrading from a 5s. It's running iOS 9.3.4. My MacBook Air is an early 2015 model and running OSX Yosemite 10.10.4. I just saw a software update for my phone and I didn't know until just a few days ago that El Capitan even existed (don't ask ), but I don't think that's the root cause of this problem and I intend to update soon.

 

[Jessica Lares]

At default, the 6S is going to take 1080p HD at 30 fps that is 130 MB per minute. So you're easily looking at 6 GB for those 1 minute ones. Those 10 minute ones are going to be about 1.3 GB each, so there's another 4 GB there. So 10 GB of video.

The smallest a photo would be is 1.3 MB, so that would be over 4 GB, but you're probably looking at them being at average 2 MB, so it would be 6-7 GB or more.

So the 17-20 GB number looks about right even without Live Photos enabled for 3,000+ pictures.

 

[agriffith14]

Thanks for your input! I stopped "Events" or whatever from syncing to my iPhone because I had this undeleteable album of 1500+ photos that I already had in Moments. However, it got rid of a good majority of my photos in Moments - but only saved me a GB. I don't understand that. Weren't the photos in that folder duplicates of the ones in Moments? That's why I wanted it gone. It was an album titled "April 18, 2014" (oddly enough, a day before I ever even owned an iPhone or a Mac), and under the photo count it said "from my Mac." It's gone now, and with it it took all of the pictures from Moments and saved me a GB.

I did the math after I did this too, and I now have almost exactly 50 minutes of video, which with your explanation would give me 6GB of video in about 40 videos. I now have 133 pictures in Moments, 452 in my Camera Roll (this is not including the videos I've already accounted for) and in iCloud Photo Sharing I have a total of 89 pictures between two albums. So that's 674 pictures all together and if each one is ~2MB that should be like 1.5 GB right? Maybe 2GB tops? I can understand why my Mac library would be so large but I definitely don't understand why my phone is still telling me I have a library 16GB in size. Sorry if this is confusing!

 

[HangJebat]

Thanks for your input! I stopped "Events" or whatever from syncing to my iPhone because I had this undeleteable album of 1500+ photos that I already had in Moments. However, it got rid of a good majority of my photos in Moments - but only saved me a GB. I don't understand that. Weren't the photos in that folder duplicates of the ones in Moments? That's why I wanted it gone. It was an album titled "April 18, 2014" (oddly enough, a day before I ever even owned an iPhone or a Mac), and under the photo count it said "from my Mac." It's gone now, and with it it took all of the pictures from Moments and saved me a GB.

I did the math after I did this too, and I now have almost exactly 50 minutes of video, which with your explanation would give me 6GB of video in about 40 videos. I now have 133 pictures in Moments, 452 in my Camera Roll (this is not including the videos I've already accounted for) and in iCloud Photo Sharing I have a total of 89 pictures between two albums. So that's 674 pictures all together and if each one is ~2MB that should be like 1.5 GB right? Maybe 2GB tops? I can understand why my Mac library would be so large but I definitely don't understand why my phone is still telling me I have a library 16GB in size. Sorry if this is confusing!

I suggest that you back up everything to a MacBook or external storage. If you need some to be on your iPhone, add it up one by one so you will know which files are actually taking huge storage space on your iPhone.