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sgreen314

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 22, 2013
45
77
In an effort to clean up my iCloud Photos, remove unnecessary photos and possibly be able to drop down a storage tier, I exported and then deleted quite a bit of photos and videos from my library. I deleted over a thousand photos, plus deleted several dozen of the larger holiday videos I hadn't watched in a while. After backing everything up to an external drive, I made sure to permanently delete everything in the recently deleted folder.

However when viewing the storage used in iCloud settings (on my laptop from which I deleted everything, my iPad, and my iPhone), the storage used by photos did not go down. Selecting all the remaining photos in the Mac Photos app then selecting "Get Info" shows a total of 39.02GB, iCloud however shows 60GB used. I have just over half a gigabyte in the "Hidden" folder, so no major reason for the discrepancy there. Total iCloud data usage was about 62GB before this process, and after!

It's been about a week since I started this process with no change in used iCloud Photos data usage. No idea on the original amount of data I deleted, didn't think to check before deleting, saw no reason to. I'm just confused about why there is such a discrepancy between what two difference processes are reporting. And no, this is not just confusion about local Mac storage; local storage shows 2.34 GB used, about what I would expect for having "Optimize Mac Storage" selected in Photos settings.

I've even tried some "fixes" I saw online; set computer date several months before or ahead of actual time to double check recently deleted album, disable then reenable Photos being saved in iCloud, restarts on other devices of course; no change.

A bug? Some hidden hidden photos? Something else I've missed? Or do I just need to be more patient for Apple's servers to catch up?! Open to suggestions, thanks for the help.


Screenshot 2025-06-20 at 09.04.20.png
Screenshot 2025-06-20 at 09.05.26.png
 
I tested out an idea I had; I selected "Download Originals" in Photos on my Air. I waited the afternoon for everything to download, then checked total sizes again. Selecting all the photos my library and getting info again I got a total of 38.33GB, less than before! Looking at storage used on my Air for Photos in Settings showed 45.56GB; more than library size but less than the iCloud total of 60GB which was still the same.

After changing Photos settings back to 'Optimize', waiting, then checking total file sizes again, everything went back the total file sizes as before.

Must be a bug on Apple's end! I do have full (and multiple) external backups of everything in my library. I am hesitant to downgrade from the 200GB iCloud storage to 50GB to see how everything handles an apparent storage overflow until any other ideas come to light in case something more dastardly happens.

Thanks for reading and any additional ideas or thoughts!
 
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