iPhone iOS 11 Photos offloading WAY too aggressively

[ignatius345]

Anybody else notice a change in Photos storage optimization since iOS 11?

I have a pretty big iCloud Photos library, about 170GB, and so of course I have "optimize phone storage" turned on. It's worked really well for me in the past, and I love having all those photos available. The full library is stored on my big iMac at home, and it's all synced via a big 2TB iCloud plan I'm paying dearly for.

The problem is, since iOS 11, I'm finding that even a photo I took an hour ago has already been "offloaded" from the phone and has to be re-downloaded from iCloud to be viewed full-size. And, even worse, if I view a full-sized image in Photos (downloading it in the process) and then look again an hour later and it's already purged and has to be re-downloaded.

It's murdering my cell data plan, and seems far too aggressive -- especially since I have a good 12 GB of space free on my phone. You'd think that some basic logic would dictate that at the very least, photos viewed or taken in the past 24 hours should be stored locally if there's enough space.

I don't remember this being a big problem in iOS 10.

 

[whitedragon101]

iCloud in all its forms really needs work.

 

[ignatius345]

I don't know, I'm using iCloud for a lot of things these days (Calendars, Notes, and the back end of most apps I use), and find it generally extremely reliable. It's improved a LOT in the past few years.

iCloud Photos generally (for me) works exactly as it should, with the exception of this new cache-purging bug/feature which was introduced in iOS 11 and makes it very hard to work with.

 

[ignatius345]

Huh, ok. I'm finding it hard to believe I'm the only one with this issue but whatever.