Recently I have had some issues with storage on my device. To narrow down what may be causing the issue I removed 90% of my installed applications. Since this did not fix my issue I checked my storage listed against my storage shown in finder on my Mac. I was able to determine that my photos are what was taking up most of my space. I have had some issues with photos disappearing from my iCloud photos library, so I was perplexed how photos disappearing and photos taking up the lions share of my storage were connected. Especially since the missing photos are from my son and daughters birth.
I have been using another cloud storage app from another company as a backup option, so I have all my photos that went missing safe in another service. This did not solve my photos library on my phone taking up 20+ GBs when using optimize for iPhone storage options and iCloud photos.
To further test, I turned off iCloud photos and regularly manually manage my iPhones photos. This meant I was connecting my phone to my Mac regularly and importing then deleting my photos from my iPhone. My storage on my Mac and iPhone reflected the same 20+ GBs taking up space listed as photos though.
I called into Apple support and they recommended erasing and reinstalling the operating system. I have experienced this issue before when I had an iPhone 6s. Unfortunately I lost that device and was not able to explore the issue as in-depth.
So to summarize I had photos missing from my iCloud photos library and my photos library with iCloud photos turned off and all photo related apps removed, my storage for photos still exceeded 20 GBs. This is after updating to the new iOS 17 from 16 as well. In addition to happening previously on my older iPhones. Though there are two issues here they are separate. One is a cloud based service and one is on the device that persists even with the cloud based service turned off.
Apple had no idea how my photos were missing and/or why my storage was being taken up by photos. I am a bit too curious to just let it go. So I set about finding out what happened. My first move was to use an off the shelf app to recover data. My assumption was that my missing photos were stuck on my phone somehow and I could recover them. Recovery software were able to find some thumbnails and a few photos but none where near the 20 GBs of photos and videos listed on my storage.
Since off the shelf solutions didn't work I decided to try commercial grade recovery solutions. It has been over a month since I reached out to them and have not gotten word back. So I took a different approach. I started to explore the file system of my iPhone with some solutions via terminal. To my surprise I was able to locate quite a bit of videos that were appear to be the culprit. The videos in question have nothing to do with my children birth. They are from November of 2022. They were found in the /iPhone/DCIM/APPLE100 folder. The interesting thing is that their date created is showing as February of 2023.
I am able to delete the photos or erase and reinstall to resolve my issue. Since this issue has persisted over multiple iOS versions and devices (I traditionally do not restore from a backup. I setup as new and sign into my services). I would like to get a more definitive answer. I know that many things can update or change the date created I see in finder, but I am curious as to why it shows a specific month from 2023 and it has not changed. I would also like to know a bit more as to why these videos are saved in the DCIM if I was using iCloud photos when they were taken. I was hoping that someone here may know more than I regarding this. As a former Advisor I know that other users have also happened upon this storage issue and would also like to explore options to avoid it in the future.
Any light that can be shed on the situation would be great!
update:
Found some of my missing family photos and videos in hidden folders.
I have been using another cloud storage app from another company as a backup option, so I have all my photos that went missing safe in another service. This did not solve my photos library on my phone taking up 20+ GBs when using optimize for iPhone storage options and iCloud photos.
To further test, I turned off iCloud photos and regularly manually manage my iPhones photos. This meant I was connecting my phone to my Mac regularly and importing then deleting my photos from my iPhone. My storage on my Mac and iPhone reflected the same 20+ GBs taking up space listed as photos though.
I called into Apple support and they recommended erasing and reinstalling the operating system. I have experienced this issue before when I had an iPhone 6s. Unfortunately I lost that device and was not able to explore the issue as in-depth.
So to summarize I had photos missing from my iCloud photos library and my photos library with iCloud photos turned off and all photo related apps removed, my storage for photos still exceeded 20 GBs. This is after updating to the new iOS 17 from 16 as well. In addition to happening previously on my older iPhones. Though there are two issues here they are separate. One is a cloud based service and one is on the device that persists even with the cloud based service turned off.
Apple had no idea how my photos were missing and/or why my storage was being taken up by photos. I am a bit too curious to just let it go. So I set about finding out what happened. My first move was to use an off the shelf app to recover data. My assumption was that my missing photos were stuck on my phone somehow and I could recover them. Recovery software were able to find some thumbnails and a few photos but none where near the 20 GBs of photos and videos listed on my storage.
Since off the shelf solutions didn't work I decided to try commercial grade recovery solutions. It has been over a month since I reached out to them and have not gotten word back. So I took a different approach. I started to explore the file system of my iPhone with some solutions via terminal. To my surprise I was able to locate quite a bit of videos that were appear to be the culprit. The videos in question have nothing to do with my children birth. They are from November of 2022. They were found in the /iPhone/DCIM/APPLE100 folder. The interesting thing is that their date created is showing as February of 2023.
I am able to delete the photos or erase and reinstall to resolve my issue. Since this issue has persisted over multiple iOS versions and devices (I traditionally do not restore from a backup. I setup as new and sign into my services). I would like to get a more definitive answer. I know that many things can update or change the date created I see in finder, but I am curious as to why it shows a specific month from 2023 and it has not changed. I would also like to know a bit more as to why these videos are saved in the DCIM if I was using iCloud photos when they were taken. I was hoping that someone here may know more than I regarding this. As a former Advisor I know that other users have also happened upon this storage issue and would also like to explore options to avoid it in the future.
Any light that can be shed on the situation would be great!
update:
Found some of my missing family photos and videos in hidden folders.
Last edited: