iOS “Documents and Data” Issue
Since the iPhone 15 was released, there’s been a lot of hype around its ability to film in 4K, 60fps, RAW, and more. In theory, all of this sounds great, but I’ve come across a huge issue that seems to have plagued Apple for years: the Photos Library ‘document and data’ storage problem.
If you’re a content creator using your iPhone and taking full advantage of its hyped recording features, you’re going to run into an issue quickly. Your Photo Library will consume a massive amount of storage, and there’s no easy way to avoid it. Even if you use an external SSD to save the content recorded on your iPhone, it will still automatically save to your Photo Library app and remain there, regardless of whether you’ve deleted the pictures or videos from the app.
For example, my Photo Library was reportedly using 80GB of storage, so I transferred all of my content to an external SSD. After the transfer, I only had around 11GB worth of data within my SSD file(photo/vid). That’s 7x less than what it claimed was being used. So, where is that extra 70GB+ coming from, and why is it still on my my Photo Library App?
So where do I access this hidden ‘document and data’ storage within Photo library App.You can’t delete or access this hidden data directly through your iPhone or even when it’s plugged into a Mac.unless, you download an app that lets you transfer and manage files between your iOS device and a Windows or Mac computer. This data is saved into several folders within your iPhone and iCloud, even if your iCloud isn’t activated. The Photo Library app automatically creates and mutates/copies DCMI folders, which contain your videos, pictures, metadata, etc.
You can access and delete these files manually, but doing so can also delete or corrupt your videos and pictures if you haven’t already removed them from your library. So, make sure you transfer them elsewhere before doing this. There’s no way to prevent the app from creating these mutations of your content.
A major problem is that there’s no way to avoid having your content saved into the Photo app or iPhone. Even if there was, many iOS applications rely on access to the Photo Library. So, there’s a huge reliance on this app overall.
Apps can glitch and overestimate storage usage, but usually, you can delete and reset them easily. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t provide that option for the Photo Library. A fix would be to allow users to reset or delete all storage on the app from iOS itself.
I believe there’s an monetary incentive for Apple to push users to purchase more iCloud storage or upgrade to iPhones with larger storage, which may explain why this hasn’t been addressed. If you’re recording 4K 60fps Apple Log footage that’s 15-20 minutes long, you’ll quickly eat up several GBs of storage. In just a few days, you could fill your storage, forcing you to purchase more storage or repeatedly connecting your iPhone to your computer to then use iExplorer to manually delete them.
This is a huge concern for Apple users, especially content creators. While the features sound great in theory, there are so many practical issues that make them nearly impossible to fully utilize.
If you’re deciding between smartphones, I’d suggest getting an Android for more control over your device, especially when it comes to managing storage. And if you’re looking for an operating system, I’d recommend using Linux instead.
Since the iPhone 15 was released, there’s been a lot of hype around its ability to film in 4K, 60fps, RAW, and more. In theory, all of this sounds great, but I’ve come across a huge issue that seems to have plagued Apple for years: the Photos Library ‘document and data’ storage problem.
If you’re a content creator using your iPhone and taking full advantage of its hyped recording features, you’re going to run into an issue quickly. Your Photo Library will consume a massive amount of storage, and there’s no easy way to avoid it. Even if you use an external SSD to save the content recorded on your iPhone, it will still automatically save to your Photo Library app and remain there, regardless of whether you’ve deleted the pictures or videos from the app.
For example, my Photo Library was reportedly using 80GB of storage, so I transferred all of my content to an external SSD. After the transfer, I only had around 11GB worth of data within my SSD file(photo/vid). That’s 7x less than what it claimed was being used. So, where is that extra 70GB+ coming from, and why is it still on my my Photo Library App?
So where do I access this hidden ‘document and data’ storage within Photo library App.You can’t delete or access this hidden data directly through your iPhone or even when it’s plugged into a Mac.unless, you download an app that lets you transfer and manage files between your iOS device and a Windows or Mac computer. This data is saved into several folders within your iPhone and iCloud, even if your iCloud isn’t activated. The Photo Library app automatically creates and mutates/copies DCMI folders, which contain your videos, pictures, metadata, etc.
You can access and delete these files manually, but doing so can also delete or corrupt your videos and pictures if you haven’t already removed them from your library. So, make sure you transfer them elsewhere before doing this. There’s no way to prevent the app from creating these mutations of your content.
A major problem is that there’s no way to avoid having your content saved into the Photo app or iPhone. Even if there was, many iOS applications rely on access to the Photo Library. So, there’s a huge reliance on this app overall.
Apps can glitch and overestimate storage usage, but usually, you can delete and reset them easily. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t provide that option for the Photo Library. A fix would be to allow users to reset or delete all storage on the app from iOS itself.
I believe there’s an monetary incentive for Apple to push users to purchase more iCloud storage or upgrade to iPhones with larger storage, which may explain why this hasn’t been addressed. If you’re recording 4K 60fps Apple Log footage that’s 15-20 minutes long, you’ll quickly eat up several GBs of storage. In just a few days, you could fill your storage, forcing you to purchase more storage or repeatedly connecting your iPhone to your computer to then use iExplorer to manually delete them.
This is a huge concern for Apple users, especially content creators. While the features sound great in theory, there are so many practical issues that make them nearly impossible to fully utilize.
If you’re deciding between smartphones, I’d suggest getting an Android for more control over your device, especially when it comes to managing storage. And if you’re looking for an operating system, I’d recommend using Linux instead.
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