Apple needs to give more control over how much storage the Photos app uses.

Like a lot of people, I have enough photos and videos that they won’t fit on my iPhone anymore.¹ So I have the ‘Optimise iPhone Storage’ option enabled, which keeps recent photos on-device, but will download older ones on demand when I view them. Sure, sometimes when you want to view on old video it takes longer to download than I’d like. But for the most part it works well.

The glaring issue: you get zero control over how much storage Photos uses.

I often run low on storage on my iPhone or Mac. Then I check, and Photos is using 38 GB. That’s too much for my liking. But what can I do? Absolutely nothing.

This morning, I wanted to upgrade my iPad to iOS 18. Not enough storage. I needed 3 GB free. Here’s what my storage looked like:

Nearly every app shown above is something I use daily, and none are storage hogs. I’d have to delete several just to squeeze out the required space.

What would be far easier? Telling Photos to free up space. But nope, I can’t. So I simply skipped the update.

Hundreds of millions of people have been in the iPhone ecosystem for over a decade now. Many can’t fit all their photos on their phone and use the ‘Optimise iPhone Storage’ feature. How many can’t install a new app or update iOS because Photos uses too much space?

Considering Apple loves it when users quickly upgrade to the latest iOS, you’d think they’d make it as seamless as possible? Letting users manually clear some of the Photos cache seems like an obvious way to free up some storage.

• APPLE
• MOAN
• IPHONE
• IPAD
• STORAGE