Need advice regarding photo storage

[torbjornhb]

Hi.
I have been debating this for a long time, but I'm not sure what to do.

Today i have about 8000 photos in my I photo library. These are pictures taken with the phones I've owned the last years.

In my Google Photos library, I have about 80 000 pictures.

I've been tempted to import all the pictures to Photos on my Mac and store them in iCloud because I find it easy to sort pictures in maps and galleries, and not to mention the possibility to get "Memories" from far more pictures. But, I have my doubts about how smart this is. I know that the pictures won't be in their original file on m my I-devices, and therefore won't fill up all the space. But, is there any way to set a limited for how much storage it will take up on the phone or the computer?

For example, just now my 8k photos takes up 14 GB. Could I expect the 80k photos take up way much more?

I anyone have a better solution for how to organize pictures in an easy way, I'll be glad for every single suggestion. But it needs to be easy, but manually tag every picture like in Lightroom, etc..

Thanks 🙂

 

[J|M]

I am almost in the same boat.

I'm trying to figure out, out of the 200 GB storage I have on iCloud, how much will that save on my Mac and iPhone? Do I still need to consider more space when purchasing a new device? Or should iCloud suffice?

 

[torbjornhb]

I am almost in the same boat.

I'm trying to figure out, out of the 200 GB storage I have on iCloud, how much will that save on my Mac and iPhone? Do I still need to consider more space when purchasing a new device? Or should iCloud suffice?

Not sure what you're thinking of... Could you explain more detailed? What kind of device are you planning to buy?

 

[tiess]

If you enable “optimized storage” in Photos settings, Mac and iPhone will automatically clear up space by deleting photos (only those that are also in iCloud) when storage runs low on you device.

 

[tiess]

I am almost in the same boat.

I'm trying to figure out, out of the 200 GB storage I have on iCloud, how much will that save on my Mac and iPhone? Do I still need to consider more space when purchasing a new device? Or should iCloud suffice?

You don’t really need to consider this. You’ll probably need some space to save the low res thumbnails (this is very little and I think might even be optional if you’re really out of storage), but the full res images can be entirely in iCloud if needed.

You will of course need a sufficient iCloud plan regardless of device storage.

 

[J|M]

You don’t really need to consider this. You’ll probably need some space to save the low res thumbnails (this is very little and I think might even be optional if you’re really out of storage), but the full res images can be entirely in iCloud if needed.

You will of course need a sufficient iCloud plan regardless of device storage.

Alright, that's kinda what I wanted to know.

So iCloud space is more important than device storage, right?

I just don't want to worry about storage in general (local or cloud) so I opted to 200GB plan that way (my thinking is) I would always have space...

 

[tiess]

Alright, that's kinda what I wanted to know.

So iCloud space is more important than device storage, right?

I just don't want to worry about storage in general (local or cloud) so I opted to 200GB plan that way (my thinking is) I would always have space...

iCloud storage plan is the important thing to look at for iCloud Photos and files in iCloud Drive. You still need local storage for other things, to install apps for example.

For the latest iPhone 13 lineup, all base models have 128GB storage, which should be plenty for most people.

Example for my situation: 16k photos and 700 videos, using ~100GB iCloud space, but currently only ~6GB on my iPhone (with about 40% free space left on device)

 

[purdnost]

The only reason I don’t have all my photos in iCloud is because the thumbnails alone far exceed the amount of space I have available on my iPhone. So, even with the optimize storage setting enabled, it’s just not an option for me to keep everything in iCloud. So, most of media resides on an external hard drive. Still considering practical and affordable option to store them in a way that allows convenient access to them as I don’t own a computer (just an iPhone and an iPad Pro).