Photos clear cache

[Mcrumors David]

How can I clear the cache of the Photos app? It seems it is using ~7Gg for only caching thumbnails ...😵‍💫 (which sucks on my 64Gb iPhone)

--- ... As opposed to me having 150'000 photos in my Google Photos drive which on my iPhone is only using 1.4Gb!

--

 

[Slartibart]

I assume you have "Optimise iPhone Storage" enabled in the system settings?
As a result Photos keeps »smaller-sized versions« of images and videos - not just thumbnails.

I do not use Google Photos - but I use Amazon Photos and I guess they both work similar: within the Amazon Photos app only thumbnails seem to be stored - these thumbs/previews for e.g. about 2200 photos currently on my iPad occupy just about 330Mb.

At the same time these 2200 original photos occupy about 50 Gb on my iPad.
Activating "Optimise Photos" will result in just about 5 GB occupied storage space for the versions kept locally.

2200 Originals ≈ 50Gb; Optimized ≈ 5Gb; previews in cloud app ≈ 330Mb.
This does reflect more or less your observation, doesn’t it?


But: the quality of these optimized versions in Apple Photos is more then sufficient for a broad range of usage without the need to download data.

The tumbs/previews in Amazon Photos aren’t- and I’m quite sure they aren’t intended to.
Your thumbs/preview in Google Photos seem to be even higher compressed and/or have of lower resolution (?)



TL;DR:

• The quality and resolution of the optimized versions of photos and videos created by iOS and iPadOS can easily be used without the need to download data.
  • These optimized files occupy significantly less storage space than the originals.
• Other apps like Amazon Photos&Co. which store images and/or video in the cloud and allow to manage them there, use only preview/thumbnails within the storage container of their app.
  • These previews/thumbs seems to be much higher compressed/of much lower resolution compared to iOS/iPadOS's optimized versions.
  • These previews/thumbs can’t be used like the iOS/iPadOS optimized versions of photos and videos.

nota bene: If Google Photos meets all requirements - why not just delete the images and videos in Apple Photos after transferring them to Google's cloud service? 🤷

 

[Mcrumors David]

I assume you have "Optimise iPhone Storage" enabled in the system settings?
As a result Photos keeps »smaller-sized versions« of images and videos - not just thumbnails.

...

Thank you for your reply. (Yes "optimize storage..." is turned on).

I assume the same, that the thumbnails are simply more high-res.


...Google Photos does not meet my requirements at all 🤣, it's laggy, and overall UI sucks (to me) ..amongst many other problems it has...

 

[lostless]

I’ve noticed that When using optimized storage, the phone will still keep a good chunk of pictures locally for a while. Especially photos that are viewed/used a lot or recent photos taken. Also if you you’ve been using other apps to back up your photos, like Amazon or google, those will have to download the photos from iCloud and cache them locally for a while to upload to themselves. And I think the phone only optimizes storage when plugged in.
Also the previews in photos are pretty good quality. And you have well over 100,000 photos, the previews add up. With 8000 photos of my own, the cache on my phone is slightly over 2 gigs. Google photos previews are like potato quality and probably don’t take as much space

 

[cynics]

Each thumbnail is hundred or so kilobytes obviously depends on the image. iOS will cache photos you open and unless it has a reason it keeps it cached. Its requires battery and wear on the nand to delete it and if you open it again it will need to redownload the photo using data and battery, rewriting it to nand causing more wear on it.

iOS uses the storage space if you aren't going to. Its poor programming to not use an available resource to potentially increase performance.