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Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

338 points by amin 3y ago

atlas_hugged 3y ago
Am I reading this right? If this is widespread, this could be seen as apple bloating figures to push people to upgrade, which could lead to a lawsuit, no? IANAL
- abhinavk 3y ago
  If you edit a photo/video in file rather than saving as a new file, iOS retains the original file so that you can undo/revert. It doesn’t show the original anywhere in Photos or iCloud gallery. That might be the reason.
  - Joeri 3y ago
    You can also edit with third party software, and they can embed whatever metadata they want to allow those edits to be modified, so there might not actually be an upper bound on how much larger you can make a photo or video by editing.
- mojo74 3y ago
  Funny, this was may take on the article too. I suppose one could download x amount of files from one cloud storage and upload it to another to see if there is any obvious discrepancy. Perhaps Apple are still using their old file system format for icloud? It's been around for a good few years now and perhaps they simply haven't bothered to ever change the type of storage format they use. Maybe those with older accounts have their images / videos on the 'older' drives?
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    I don't believe iCloud is a filesystem, it's not block-level. It's object-level, like S3, with a bunch of OS-side jank to make it look like a conventional directory and filesystem (which often fails miserably and dangerously). It's similar levels of reliability to an FTP account mounted with curlftpfs[1] - except the latter at least fails in understandable ways and can be debugged. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
    - mojo74 3y ago
      'Failing miserably and dangerously' is the new 'Move fast and break things'
    - realusername 3y ago
      That's exactly my mental model of it as well, some janky home made s3 fixed with tape. I really advise anybody to save their data somewhere else as well before in inevitably stops working.
- isodev 3y ago
  > this could be seen as apple bloating figures No, the OP doesn’t take into account that adding media to Photos is not a simple “copy and store a file”. The Photos app (like all apps) has its custom Photos Library file format. So when one ads a picture or a video, the Photos app analyses it and stores all kinds of metadata that’s needed for the Photos app to work, including edit history and other bits. This is what eventually gets synced to iCloud.
Havoc 3y ago
Good timing..I've been getting the same warning mails (though 50gb). Was planning to go through photos but checking vids first makes sense
- sgt 3y ago
  Been getting the same warning emails (200GB in my case). So I tried this now, but it doesn't seem to highlight anything after pasting in the gist into Chrome. Does it work for you?
  - Havoc 3y ago
    >after pasting in the gist into Chrome. No idea what this means so can't tell you whether it works for me
    - sgt 3y ago
      The original article had a JavaScript snippet you post into the browser to do the highlighting for you.
  - 369548684892826 3y ago
    If you have a Windows machine lying around, the iCloud app lets you download all your media out of iCloud Photos. Once it's all on Windows it's a lot easier to find the largest files!
    - sgt 3y ago
      You can also do that with Photos (leaving "optimize storage" off) and downloading all to your Mac, I believe. I haven't actually done yet that since it is quite a large download.
    - eunice 3y ago
      the windows icloud app doesn't download the highest quality versions of each file though right?
cianmm 3y ago
Interesting article. I have my own problem, that caused me to have to upgrade my iCloud plan, and thus may not be a high priority fix for Apple. If you shoot RAW+JPEG (not a super-rare thing to do, for photo enthusiasts) then Apple Photos links the two images. Which is useful, rather than having a bunch of kinda-duplicates littering your library you can easily toggle between RAW and JPEG. But this combining, along with the file system design described in this article, makes it impossible (as far as I can tell, anyway) to easily separate them and delete the RAWs. So years later, I have HUGE RAW files that I'll never touch that I can't delete, because I want to keep the much smaller JPEGS. Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library. So I have to upgrade.
- ylk 3y ago
  Possibly stupid question: why can’t the metadata be exported and imported? Is there other metadata aside from the exif data? Or does Apple not export all of it? And in case you’re talking about additional features like face recognition, doesn’t the app do that again once you imported the jpeg?
  - Ayesh 3y ago
    Im not in Apple ecosystem at all, so I don't have an answer to your question. But in RAW/JPG world, the metadata and edits is already a solved problem with Sidecar files + EXIF data. Sure, EXIF fields are kinda messy but I'm sure it's better than Apple has rolled by their own.
- icebergonfire 3y ago
  Not in your situation at this point, but as a photo nerd I will eventually be so I took to Google. > Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library. Apparently when you File/Export Unmodified Originals it will export the RAW+HEIC and a separate sidecar file containing the metadata. You can then move the RAW file away and import the HEIC file, which will autoimport the sidecar metadata file too. You lose edits though, although it seems you can "copy edits" somehow. Surely a technically inclined person can AppleScript their way through this... Yet it seems needlessly cumbersome and should be a built-in function in Photos.app, it's clearly not prioritized because it helps funnel people into higher iCloud tiers.
saagarjha 3y ago
I kind of hate opaque cloud solutions like this, because their storage usage is inscrutable and their interfaces are basically never optimized to help you clear things out. Whether that’s intentional and malicious or just not a priority, I don’t really care, I just want to be in control of the stuff I’m using. I have a very similar issue with iMessage in iCloud, and unlike photos, there’s no web interface. You have to interact with it on your device. Thankfully I have a Mac so I can load up the chat database from there and see what’s using the space, but cleaning it up has been a nightmare: I have a script to find the big attachments, but if I delete them then some agent that manages the database goes into a loop for like five minutes per deletion. Then the change gets synced to iCloud (at least, I assume). So unless I fully reverse what the deletion process does and whether it is possible to do a batch operation I’m basically at the mercy of the front end they provide to clean things up, which as I mentioned earlier is absolutely not designed to make it easy to do this.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  The opaqueness is definitely a problem. My iMessage database has a corrupted spot somewhere in the message history; if I accidentally make the Messages app read that spot (via searching or scrolling back through old conversations) it'll silently start maxing out the CPU and burning energy for no reason. There is no error message, nothing obviously wrong-looking, and as far as I know everything works.
  - farconics 3y ago
    Sounds like a nightmare. Do you know what could have caused the database corruption?
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      Couple years of macOS/iOS reinstalls along with the typical shittiness of iCloud and the iMessage clients. I would be more surprised if it wasn't corrupt.
  - o-o- 3y ago
    Oh, so that's what's happening? You made me realise I have the same exact issue!
dthakur 3y ago
Compression?
- Jleagle 3y ago
  Must be bad compression if the files are getting larger?
- Snow_Falls 3y ago
  Maybe adding a lot of metadata? I know AWS block storage adds an additional 4kb metadata file for everything you upload, maybe icloud doing something similar?
cnicolaou 3y ago
Surprisingly, I've received a similar storage notice from Apple before the holidays and I decided to download all photos/videos into my own media server instead of hosting it on iCloud. There is not an easy, straight-forward way to download your archive from iCloud. I am slowly getting there using multiple machines and devices. The issue with the recent changes with Apple is that they increase the prices for no good reason. We're always going to take photos/videos and their sizes keep increasing with modern tech and capabilities.
- sgloutnikov 3y ago
  What about the Photos app on MacOS if you have one? I keep a local copy of my iCloud Photo Library and sync it through the MacOS Photos app.
  - chrischen 3y ago
    Photos app for offline storage is also woefully neglected by Apple. They don't really design it for use with an external drive (you are expected to locate your library on a internal storage or permanently attached storage). The reason is that the photo library constantly gets corrupted on external drives, forcing a long rebuild/repair process. Often the photos app doesn't even detect the iphone even when plugged in, and it's a serious bug that Apple has neglected for years.
    - geekifier 3y ago
      Everything Apple does seems to be designed to drive hardware sales. Why support external drives, when you can be up-sold for larger internal storage (at a huge markup)? The "Photo Library" could simply be a database file with references to photo locations, alas that might confuse Mac/iOS user with "files" vs "photos".
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    > What about the Photos app on MacOS if you have one? If you ever try a large-scale import/export into macOS Photos be prepared for 100% CPU, endless spinner cursors and the process ending up killed because it ran out of memory.
landswipe 3y ago
It's called a bug 'turning a blind eye'.. ie. a scam.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
It would make sense if they save the video in a few formats for being able to load them fast in the Apple apps, most video hosts do the same.
- darkstar_16 3y ago
  But that shouldn't count in the user's storage quota.
mft_ 3y ago
Okay, so it could be a bug, but it is possible that iCloud is secretly storing more than one version of the file in some cases? (After all, Apple does similar things with other media files.) The example given at the end is interesting: > So iCloud says the video is 128MB, I download it and the video is actually 48MB, and my free storage increases by ~170MB when I deleted it. Interesting! This suggests that iCloud isn't simply misrepresenting the size of the example file, as then you'd expect that deleting the 128MB file would clear ~128MB of iCloud space. Instead, the deletion clears roughly the space it reports (128MB) plus the space of the downloaded version (48MB): 128MB + 48MB = 176 MB - which might be close enough, allowing for rounding errors, as iCloud reports the free space (from the article's example) to the nearest 10 MB.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  That's probably indeed the case, but it doesn't excuse it. When you buy a hard drive or USB stick, you get a certain amount of GBs to use as you please. If you put a 1GB file on it your free space decreases by 1GB (yes this is filesystem dependent and you might lose a few KBs for metadata, but the choice of filesystem is up to you and not mandated by the storage decide). It doesn't matter that the NAND controller probably used a few megabytes of the overprovisioned area to store its block mapping tables, or maybe even duplicated your data for its convenience - you were never charged for that overprovisioned area. Here, you are sold a storage device (that you access over HTTP instead of SATA/PCIe), but when you write a 1GB file, they duplicate/convert/etc it for their convenience yet still charge you to store those duplicates you haven't asked for. That's new and unexpected.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >That's new and unexpected. For you (and me) perhaps, but not for most people[1] who appreciate having the file system abstracted away. [1]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/2032200/students-dont-know-what-files-and-folders-are-professors-say https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/2032200/students-do...
  - tcfhgj 3y ago
    Don't get the complaints, you can use different messaging apps, that don't do that to your oCloud
LUmBULtERA 3y ago
That's an interesting bug/problem(?) he ran into.. Though, on the topic of reducing storage usage, in the Photos iOS app, you can remove photo duplicates under "Albums" at the very bottom -- if you have duplicates that it recognizes, there will be a line item for this, otherwise the line item will disappear.
captn3m0 3y ago
The thing I detest the most is the weird tier that jumps from 200GB to 2TB. There’s no way to pay for incremental storage for 500GB or 1TB, which would be perfect for many families. In today’s age where storage is a commodity, this ought to be priced per GB used.
- baz00 3y ago
  You can chuck as many 50GB increments on your 200GB if you need it.
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    Really? How? I can only jump from 50 GB to 200 GB when I look at the available plans
    - baz00 3y ago
      Actually I may be wrong there. I was on 200Gb with Apply Family but have stuck 50GB on top of that for £0.99 month. I can only swap that out for a 200GB increment. This is weird because I'm sure you used to be able to do that.
      - Alifatisk 3y ago
        Oh okey, I knew that sounded too good to be true.
        captn3m0 3y ago
        I didn’t even get an option for 200GB increment.
        Alifatisk 3y ago
        That's weird, so you can only go from 5 GB -> 50 GB -> 2 TB?
InsomniacL 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that iCloud stores the full version and downloads a lower quality optimised version to your phone. If you open iPhone settings and browse to: > Apple ID > iCloud > Photos There is an option to 'Optimise iPhone Storage' which is enabled by default. This states: > If your phone is low on space, full resolution photos and videos are automatically replaced with smaller device sized versions. Full-Resolution versions can be downloaded from iCloud at any time. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Downloads should still return the original file though, so that can't be used to explain the storage size discrepancy.
  - jonathanlydall 3y ago
    There are two kinds of download options on the iCloud website, the “full quality” (e.g. HEIC file for photos) or a “quick” / “small” download which is a JPG.
  - fuckyah 3y ago
    [dead]
- wideroots 3y ago
  This doesn't explain the case when the author uploaded and downloaded a new file, and there was no big diff in file size. The file size diff only seems to be happening to the author's older video files.
  - InsomniacL 3y ago
    It does explain it and likely adds more weight to it too. Encoding additional videos takes a lot of processing power. When you upload a video to youtube, the higher-quality versions aren't available for sometime. There is likely a queuing system, maybe even a minimum weight time before a video is processed.
- 3y ago
sliq 3y ago
Can confirm, have some ideas: Apple uses different file formats "internally" and also different resolutions, maybe saving them all in parallel as "one" video, which might cause this issue. So the total space per image is actually the sum of original .mov, optimized .mp4 and thumbnail image. Also, (automated) version history might have caused this! Maybe (automatic) image optimiztion saved old and new versions of everything.
sandreas 3y ago
That's one of the reasons I self-host. I just don't trust the cloud providers regarding clarity and transparency... even if my self-hosted solution was far less reliable, less secure and less performant (I imagine it's not ;), I probably wouldn't change. I personally use immich[1], a very complete solution with iOS / Android App, Server-Component and Sync / Backup option. [1]: https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  It looks interesting but the warning at the top tells me I should wait for it to become more stable?
  - rscrawfo 3y ago
    I would if you want to use it as backup. But if you just use it to display photos and have another process for sync it’s absolutely fantastic! To me it’s better than any other interface I’ve tried. Commercial or home lab.
  - sandreas 3y ago
    Yeah, that's what I thought... but using it for 6 months now they have been pretty reliable regarding upgrades and new features. The features I appreciate the most are: - Auto-Synchronisation on Android AND iOS (this is hard to find in any other app) - Photo sharing (Accounts can have partners to share all their photos with - ideal for me and my wife) - Deduplication - The Web Interface The feature I miss the most is tags[1]. Once the app stopped working but there was a clear message on the repository / homepage that the server has to be upgraded. Since it is docker based, it was very easy to upgrade without losing any data. Same applies for backup... So if you ask me, there is no need to worry - but I would not use it as only option to store my photos and it does not replace an (off-site)-backup. [1]: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1651#discussioncomment-7469863 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1651#discus...
- brlewis 3y ago
  I think Apple just hasn't realized yet what a great sales opportunity a UI for quota management is. There's no better place to sell more storage. That's what Google does. See https://one.google.com/storage https://one.google.com/storage and https://photos.google.com/quotamanagement https://photos.google.com/quotamanagement which work well for finding stuff to delete, in the hopes that eventually you'll tire of deleting things and go ahead and buy more storage.
sccxy 3y ago
iCloud backup is real mess. Free 5GB is not enough for backing up iPhone system data any more. Most insane is that if you remove some apps from backup, then it iCloud usage goes from 4.5GB to 4.6GB.
- wideroots 3y ago
  and you're basically given to choose either stop backing up your iMessage or pay $1/mo for the extra 50gb
alephnan 3y ago
Don’t you remember how painful it was to import/export an mp3 file into an IPod? It was especially painful on a Windows PC. The biggest selling point of other mp3 players for me was the ability to transparently copy and paste files into the filesystem.
Alifatisk 3y ago
I've tried iCloud, Onedrive, Google Photos. Out of all these three, I stuck with Google Photos on my Iphone. iClouds bad pricing and storage issues led me to switch to Google Photos, It's way better. The lack of native support on iOS can be a little cumbersome though. The only thing I wish these cloud providers offered was a way to deduplicate photos / videos. That would make my life so much easier.
- Liftyee 3y ago
  > The only thing I wish these cloud providers offered was a way to deduplicate photos / videos. Same here ... but of course that would make it easier for customers to not have to pay more, so sadly don't think it's ever happening.
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    What makes it worse is even if you run a deduplication app on the folder your syncing to Google Photos, the synchronization is one way only, so the changes does not remove the duplicated items on Google Photos.
- ezfe 3y ago
  iCloud Photos has deduplication
  - nytesky 3y ago
    Yeah I ran it and shrunk my library by half. It was kinda scary since I had 100000 photos, I couldn’t really inspect the process
    - treesknees 3y ago
      I've used an app called PhotoSweeper[1]. It can access your Photos library directly. You can manually review them side-by-side or let it run automatically. You can also set thresholds of % similarity to reduce false removals. I believe it can also move the duplicates into a separate album for review later. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photosweeper/id463362050?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photosweeper/id463362050?mt=12
lovegrenoble 3y ago
It's better to self-host
asdaq1312512 3y ago
Photos.app doesn't show file size… so I thought, why not build a little Photos.app extension or a separate app that queries for large files? Turns out that the API doesn't expose "file size", at least I didn't find a straight-forward way. I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video, it will be cropped and the smaller file size will manifest. I guess that's why the file sizes differ. [Edit: someone created an AppleScript to query file sizes - I didn't test it, yet: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000422 https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000422 ]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- naltroc 3y ago
  this is the best plausible reason for why the file size differs. I've also noticed some unepxected media restoration (thought I cropped/edited a video, it is still there in full length and resolution). This also helps explain why my iPhone storage always seems to be at its limits, despite my obsessive management. Anyway, we all know foss unix ftw :P
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > thought I cropped/edited a video, it is still there in full length and resolution It's been possible to create a clip from a video file that merely changes what parts of the video are displayed without effecting the data in the original since the Classic Mac OS days. If you want to completely remove unwanted portions of a video to reduce the size without a loss of quality, there are many options. LosslessCut is a cross platform option that is both free and open source. https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
- alexwlchan 3y ago
  > I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video, it will be cropped and the smaller file size will manifest. Yup, the Photos app keeps the unmodified original file, and then any edits/crops are stored separately. You can always revert to the original file and redo your edits. So they might be storing multiple copies of the same image, with and without edits. Which API were you looking at for "file size"? I was able to get the size data from Photos.app with the PhotoKit API [1]. I've only tested it with my library of ~26k items, but it was useful for getting an indicator of the biggest items. (Although I didn't think to check whether exporting a 1GB video caused my iCloud usage to drop by 1GB.) [1]: https://alexwlchan.net/2023/finding-big-photos/ https://alexwlchan.net/2023/finding-big-photos/
znpy 3y ago
I'm being sarcastic here, but the solution could be quite simple: iCloud is billing you (both in terms of storage size and money) for both your data and the redundant copies. Other companies would build the redundancy costs into the final pricing, but Apple is known to "think different".
Havoc 3y ago
Just discovered you can see file sizes for some items under > icloud > recommended for you Finds duplicates, screenshots and big vids. Had a random vid that was 1.8gb for reasons unknown Doesn't always seem to be a accessible though
aledalgrande 3y ago
In terms of iCloud cleanup, has anyone found a way to clean up iMessage attachments > x years old, greater than n MB or from certain contacts? It would clean up so much space for me. Apple only clears > 1 year old from the settings.
tugberkk 3y ago
Apart from the iCloud fiasco, I very much like these kind of programming. We generally lost the fun of it try to make enterprise/corporate programs, we forgot to use them for personal tasks.
FaridIO 3y ago
Additionally, if you take a 4MB photo and add it to a shared album with 5 people, those 5 people all have to use up 4MB from their storage. Instead of reusing the same image and having pointers to it, it looks like it's "copied".
- carleton 3y ago
  That doesn't make sense to me. Apple says here that photos in a shared album do not count against your iCloud storage. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786
- arthurmorgan 3y ago
  Shared Albums don't count against your iCloud Storage.
seffignoz 3y ago
Thanks for the idea/solution! I converted this into a TamperMonkey/Greasemonkey script. Also added a feature to "hide" all elements that do not match the threshold. https://github.com/seffignoz/icloudcleanup https://github.com/seffignoz/icloudcleanup
NDizzle 3y ago
With the iCloud desktop app for windows I'm able to sort by size...
crossroadsguy 3y ago
There’s will be a time when there will be many open (or relatively more open) devices like FairPhone et cetera; and OSes that do not track users and suffocate you with dark patterns and hostility all around - like Graphene and Lineage; and hopefully they’d all be able to join their hands together and not reimplement the wheels of N types for the 1000th time all incompatible with each other. Hope is that there will be services and softwares on top of that spec and API of these OSes that will be the user’s choice to pick - for contact, for calendar, SMS, IM, call , media, sync, backup, device account management etc. And such devices will be widely available, also in non-first world countries, with proper OEM warranties and support. Hell, a local manufacturer can just build for that spec. I know it’s like a wishful dream. But if this happens, and when this happens, I hope a lot of us will be able to breathe free and hopefully would be candidly able to shit upon legacies of those so called fucking visionaries, who were barely not subhuman and were just rather pathetic jerks, who ensured such shit-show of walled gardens and opaquely implemented utterly inferior systems where users go and get stuck in one of the two houses of the duopoly to experience a lot of shitty things including, but not limited to, some variation of Stockholm syndrome and clear and conscious apologism. Why? Because neither of the two is acceptably good and they have become so big and they have closed it down so much that nobody else can even make a dent even if they try. And they try! So yeah, until then I will rant and feel shitty about both my iPhone 14 (as they call it - my “daily driver”) and Pixel 5a (my bread and butter phone; form factor wise less shitty one though).
sneak 3y ago
Apple interested in maximizing recurring subscription revenue? You don’t say. I’m sure this is just a harmless bug and not the source of $20M extra revenue per year across their hundreds of millions of active iCloud users.
tamiral 3y ago
there is something weird happening on iCloud, my phone storage is off even though the total size of data isnt as big as it says, i throw a lot of .zip/rar files on icloud and it seems like the data on icloud is more than it is on my HDD....
867-5309 3y ago
some possible reasons to investigate: 1. older videos have a larger file size because they are encoded less efficiently (h264 vs h265) 2. gigabytes vs gibibytes (like how a 500GB drive formats to ~465 GiB) 3. rounding errors 4. Apple fucking its customers 5. combo of the above
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kossTKR 3y ago
Tangent but does anyone else find iCloud sync random / slow? The smart thing about having both an iPhone and a Macbook should potentially be; snap a bunch of photos, instantly have them available on the computer - but no. Apple apparently chooses a random time depending on 100 factors to upload the photos in the next 30 minutes to 7 days. So you often have to airdrop a bunch of photos files completely invalidating the purpose of the sync function.
SirMaster 3y ago
Can't you just use the Apple Shortcuts app to do a lot of this? Pretty sure that can enumerate and query things like the filesize of the photos and videos in your iCloud.
tamimio 3y ago
> Videos anonymized by slow internet loading I chuckled! I believe the size difference has to do with the encoding, can’t tell for a fact since you didn’t show that part, but maybe it gets re-encoded when you download it hence the difference.
baxtr 3y ago
Slightly off topic: anyone know how to backup iCloud data (mainly photos and videos, but also notes) to an outside platform? I’m an Apple fan, but still don’t like the idea of having all my digital life on iCloud only.
- acheron 3y ago
  Disclaimer I haven't tried this yet, but I found this project recently that supposedly downloads all iCloud photos (e.g. to a NAS for local backup). https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
  - fckgw 3y ago
    I've been using a version of this for Unraid for over a year. Downloads everything from my iCloud storage to my home server. You need to re-authenticate every 90 days due to 2fa restrictions but it works great.
- BigBalli 3y ago
  I use Image Capture with my phone plugged in to save them on an external hard drive.
- AnonC 3y ago
  This is not for incremental backups but for all data tied to your Apple ID — Apple provides a data download option to get your contacts, photos, videos and a whole lot of other data. You can visit this KB [1] for details and instructions. There are some exclusions, like data that’s end-to-end encrypted. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208
BigBalli 3y ago
Was the video with size mismatch edited? Apple keeps both versions (same goes for photos, they include image and MOV for live photos).
very_good_man 3y ago
Apple needs to face criminal penalties for the dark patterns with which they prey upon their users.
spockz 3y ago
I’ve been on a similar hunt. My devices are littered with copies of videos that were shared via iMessage, WhatsApp, and other means. Each of these apps then store the copy locally which then gets backed up in iCloud. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to automatically delete all the videos/photos that I send which still have the original in the photo stream. It would be awesome to be able to automate that.
- treesknees 3y ago
  This isn't perfect, nor automated, but you can search the Messages app for photos/videos and delete them all. Assuming you've saved them already, this should clear up some iCloud space. https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-use-smart-search-filters-in-messages-on-iphone/ https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-use-smart-search-filters-i... https://www.igeeksblog.com/delete-multiple-imessage-photos-attachments-on-iphone/ https://www.igeeksblog.com/delete-multiple-imessage-photos-a...
godzillabrennus 3y ago
It seems like a giant class action lawsuit with a juicy target if Apple is overbilling customers on usage for videos in iCloud. I know lots of people paying for more storage in iCloud would appreciate the reprieve of lower costs.
sroussey 3y ago
I need a good way to cleanup a gmail account…
raz32dust 3y ago
I am so tired of these patterns. Google Photos also does not allow any easy or good way to clean up junk. Why would they? They want you to run out of space so you can pay for their cloud storage. They also have low incentive to keep photo/video storage space-efficient for the same reason.
shreezus 3y ago
On this topic...anyone know the best way to export an entire iCloud Photo Library at full resolution?
- simplezeal 3y ago
  If you have a Macbook, you can sync iCloud library at full resolution using Photos app and then export.
- meinheld111 3y ago
  There is an export service that returns a archive
orenlindsey 3y ago
Interesting, also, Apple should make a mid-tier of iCloud. If they had a 500gb (or 400 or whatever) they could have gotten this guy to pay more.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  At the cost of many others not buying the more expensive plan because it was their only option.
  - mmikeff 3y ago
    Surely there are plenty of us who would happily (or at least less reluctantly) pay incrementally more as our storage needs increase, but who baulk at trebling what we pay in one jump.
mmikeff 3y ago
The thing that is taking up loads of my iCloud storage is the 'live' video version of photos where the tiny snippet of movement has a larger filesize than the photo that it accompanies. The only way I have found so far to deal with this is to download the files locally, delete from iCloud, delete the local videos and upload the remaining still images. This is time consuming, clunky and makes me nervous that I'll delete something or lose something important in the process. Is there anything out the that help to automate that process but where there is some level of editorial control so that I can identify and keep the handful of 'live' images that I might actually want to keep?

338 points by amin 3y ago

Am I reading this right? If this is widespread, this could be seen as apple bloating figures to push people to upgrade, which could lead to a lawsuit, no? IANAL

abhinavk 3y ago
If you edit a photo/video in file rather than saving as a new file, iOS retains the original file so that you can undo/revert. It doesn’t show the original anywhere in Photos or iCloud gallery. That might be the reason.
- Joeri 3y ago
  You can also edit with third party software, and they can embed whatever metadata they want to allow those edits to be modified, so there might not actually be an upper bound on how much larger you can make a photo or video by editing.
mojo74 3y ago
Funny, this was may take on the article too. I suppose one could download x amount of files from one cloud storage and upload it to another to see if there is any obvious discrepancy. Perhaps Apple are still using their old file system format for icloud? It's been around for a good few years now and perhaps they simply haven't bothered to ever change the type of storage format they use. Maybe those with older accounts have their images / videos on the 'older' drives?
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  I don't believe iCloud is a filesystem, it's not block-level. It's object-level, like S3, with a bunch of OS-side jank to make it look like a conventional directory and filesystem (which often fails miserably and dangerously). It's similar levels of reliability to an FTP account mounted with curlftpfs[1] - except the latter at least fails in understandable ways and can be debugged. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - mojo74 3y ago
    'Failing miserably and dangerously' is the new 'Move fast and break things'
  - realusername 3y ago
    That's exactly my mental model of it as well, some janky home made s3 fixed with tape. I really advise anybody to save their data somewhere else as well before in inevitably stops working.
isodev 3y ago
> this could be seen as apple bloating figures No, the OP doesn’t take into account that adding media to Photos is not a simple “copy and store a file”. The Photos app (like all apps) has its custom Photos Library file format. So when one ads a picture or a video, the Photos app analyses it and stores all kinds of metadata that’s needed for the Photos app to work, including edit history and other bits. This is what eventually gets synced to iCloud.

Havoc 3y ago

Good timing..I've been getting the same warning mails (though 50gb). Was planning to go through photos but checking vids first makes sense

sgt 3y ago
Been getting the same warning emails (200GB in my case). So I tried this now, but it doesn't seem to highlight anything after pasting in the gist into Chrome. Does it work for you?
- Havoc 3y ago
  >after pasting in the gist into Chrome. No idea what this means so can't tell you whether it works for me
  - sgt 3y ago
    The original article had a JavaScript snippet you post into the browser to do the highlighting for you.
- 369548684892826 3y ago
  If you have a Windows machine lying around, the iCloud app lets you download all your media out of iCloud Photos. Once it's all on Windows it's a lot easier to find the largest files!
  - sgt 3y ago
    You can also do that with Photos (leaving "optimize storage" off) and downloading all to your Mac, I believe. I haven't actually done yet that since it is quite a large download.
  - eunice 3y ago
    the windows icloud app doesn't download the highest quality versions of each file though right?

cianmm 3y ago

Interesting article. I have my own problem, that caused me to have to upgrade my iCloud plan, and thus may not be a high priority fix for Apple. If you shoot RAW+JPEG (not a super-rare thing to do, for photo enthusiasts) then Apple Photos links the two images. Which is useful, rather than having a bunch of kinda-duplicates littering your library you can easily toggle between RAW and JPEG. But this combining, along with the file system design described in this article, makes it impossible (as far as I can tell, anyway) to easily separate them and delete the RAWs. So years later, I have HUGE RAW files that I'll never touch that I can't delete, because I want to keep the much smaller JPEGS. Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library. So I have to upgrade.

ylk 3y ago
Possibly stupid question: why can’t the metadata be exported and imported? Is there other metadata aside from the exif data? Or does Apple not export all of it? And in case you’re talking about additional features like face recognition, doesn’t the app do that again once you imported the jpeg?
- Ayesh 3y ago
  Im not in Apple ecosystem at all, so I don't have an answer to your question. But in RAW/JPG world, the metadata and edits is already a solved problem with Sidecar files + EXIF data. Sure, EXIF fields are kinda messy but I'm sure it's better than Apple has rolled by their own.
icebergonfire 3y ago
Not in your situation at this point, but as a photo nerd I will eventually be so I took to Google. > Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library. Apparently when you File/Export Unmodified Originals it will export the RAW+HEIC and a separate sidecar file containing the metadata. You can then move the RAW file away and import the HEIC file, which will autoimport the sidecar metadata file too. You lose edits though, although it seems you can "copy edits" somehow. Surely a technically inclined person can AppleScript their way through this... Yet it seems needlessly cumbersome and should be a built-in function in Photos.app, it's clearly not prioritized because it helps funnel people into higher iCloud tiers.

saagarjha 3y ago

I kind of hate opaque cloud solutions like this, because their storage usage is inscrutable and their interfaces are basically never optimized to help you clear things out. Whether that’s intentional and malicious or just not a priority, I don’t really care, I just want to be in control of the stuff I’m using. I have a very similar issue with iMessage in iCloud, and unlike photos, there’s no web interface. You have to interact with it on your device. Thankfully I have a Mac so I can load up the chat database from there and see what’s using the space, but cleaning it up has been a nightmare: I have a script to find the big attachments, but if I delete them then some agent that manages the database goes into a loop for like five minutes per deletion. Then the change gets synced to iCloud (at least, I assume). So unless I fully reverse what the deletion process does and whether it is possible to do a batch operation I’m basically at the mercy of the front end they provide to clean things up, which as I mentioned earlier is absolutely not designed to make it easy to do this.

Nextgrid 3y ago
The opaqueness is definitely a problem. My iMessage database has a corrupted spot somewhere in the message history; if I accidentally make the Messages app read that spot (via searching or scrolling back through old conversations) it'll silently start maxing out the CPU and burning energy for no reason. There is no error message, nothing obviously wrong-looking, and as far as I know everything works.
- farconics 3y ago
  Sounds like a nightmare. Do you know what could have caused the database corruption?
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Couple years of macOS/iOS reinstalls along with the typical shittiness of iCloud and the iMessage clients. I would be more surprised if it wasn't corrupt.
- o-o- 3y ago
  Oh, so that's what's happening? You made me realise I have the same exact issue!

dthakur 3y ago

Compression?

Jleagle 3y ago
Must be bad compression if the files are getting larger?
Snow_Falls 3y ago
Maybe adding a lot of metadata? I know AWS block storage adds an additional 4kb metadata file for everything you upload, maybe icloud doing something similar?

cnicolaou 3y ago

Surprisingly, I've received a similar storage notice from Apple before the holidays and I decided to download all photos/videos into my own media server instead of hosting it on iCloud. There is not an easy, straight-forward way to download your archive from iCloud. I am slowly getting there using multiple machines and devices. The issue with the recent changes with Apple is that they increase the prices for no good reason. We're always going to take photos/videos and their sizes keep increasing with modern tech and capabilities.

sgloutnikov 3y ago
What about the Photos app on MacOS if you have one? I keep a local copy of my iCloud Photo Library and sync it through the MacOS Photos app.
- chrischen 3y ago
  Photos app for offline storage is also woefully neglected by Apple. They don't really design it for use with an external drive (you are expected to locate your library on a internal storage or permanently attached storage). The reason is that the photo library constantly gets corrupted on external drives, forcing a long rebuild/repair process. Often the photos app doesn't even detect the iphone even when plugged in, and it's a serious bug that Apple has neglected for years.
  - geekifier 3y ago
    Everything Apple does seems to be designed to drive hardware sales. Why support external drives, when you can be up-sold for larger internal storage (at a huge markup)? The "Photo Library" could simply be a database file with references to photo locations, alas that might confuse Mac/iOS user with "files" vs "photos".
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > What about the Photos app on MacOS if you have one? If you ever try a large-scale import/export into macOS Photos be prepared for 100% CPU, endless spinner cursors and the process ending up killed because it ran out of memory.

landswipe 3y ago

It's called a bug 'turning a blind eye'.. ie. a scam.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

It would make sense if they save the video in a few formats for being able to load them fast in the Apple apps, most video hosts do the same.

darkstar_16 3y ago
But that shouldn't count in the user's storage quota.

mft_ 3y ago

Okay, so it could be a bug, but it is possible that iCloud is secretly storing more than one version of the file in some cases? (After all, Apple does similar things with other media files.) The example given at the end is interesting: > So iCloud says the video is 128MB, I download it and the video is actually 48MB, and my free storage increases by ~170MB when I deleted it. Interesting! This suggests that iCloud isn't simply misrepresenting the size of the example file, as then you'd expect that deleting the 128MB file would clear ~128MB of iCloud space. Instead, the deletion clears roughly the space it reports (128MB) plus the space of the downloaded version (48MB): 128MB + 48MB = 176 MB - which might be close enough, allowing for rounding errors, as iCloud reports the free space (from the article's example) to the nearest 10 MB.

Nextgrid 3y ago
That's probably indeed the case, but it doesn't excuse it. When you buy a hard drive or USB stick, you get a certain amount of GBs to use as you please. If you put a 1GB file on it your free space decreases by 1GB (yes this is filesystem dependent and you might lose a few KBs for metadata, but the choice of filesystem is up to you and not mandated by the storage decide). It doesn't matter that the NAND controller probably used a few megabytes of the overprovisioned area to store its block mapping tables, or maybe even duplicated your data for its convenience - you were never charged for that overprovisioned area. Here, you are sold a storage device (that you access over HTTP instead of SATA/PCIe), but when you write a 1GB file, they duplicate/convert/etc it for their convenience yet still charge you to store those duplicates you haven't asked for. That's new and unexpected.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >That's new and unexpected. For you (and me) perhaps, but not for most people[1] who appreciate having the file system abstracted away. [1]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/2032200/students-dont-know-what-files-and-folders-are-professors-say https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/2032200/students-do...
- tcfhgj 3y ago
  Don't get the complaints, you can use different messaging apps, that don't do that to your oCloud

LUmBULtERA 3y ago

That's an interesting bug/problem(?) he ran into.. Though, on the topic of reducing storage usage, in the Photos iOS app, you can remove photo duplicates under "Albums" at the very bottom -- if you have duplicates that it recognizes, there will be a line item for this, otherwise the line item will disappear.

captn3m0 3y ago

The thing I detest the most is the weird tier that jumps from 200GB to 2TB. There’s no way to pay for incremental storage for 500GB or 1TB, which would be perfect for many families. In today’s age where storage is a commodity, this ought to be priced per GB used.

baz00 3y ago
You can chuck as many 50GB increments on your 200GB if you need it.
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  Really? How? I can only jump from 50 GB to 200 GB when I look at the available plans
  - baz00 3y ago
    Actually I may be wrong there. I was on 200Gb with Apply Family but have stuck 50GB on top of that for £0.99 month. I can only swap that out for a 200GB increment. This is weird because I'm sure you used to be able to do that.
    - Alifatisk 3y ago
      Oh okey, I knew that sounded too good to be true.
      - captn3m0 3y ago
        I didn’t even get an option for 200GB increment.
        Alifatisk 3y ago
        That's weird, so you can only go from 5 GB -> 50 GB -> 2 TB?

InsomniacL 3y ago

I'm pretty sure that iCloud stores the full version and downloads a lower quality optimised version to your phone. If you open iPhone settings and browse to: > Apple ID > iCloud > Photos There is an option to 'Optimise iPhone Storage' which is enabled by default. This states: > If your phone is low on space, full resolution photos and videos are automatically replaced with smaller device sized versions. Full-Resolution versions can be downloaded from iCloud at any time. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Nextgrid 3y ago
Downloads should still return the original file though, so that can't be used to explain the storage size discrepancy.
- jonathanlydall 3y ago
  There are two kinds of download options on the iCloud website, the “full quality” (e.g. HEIC file for photos) or a “quick” / “small” download which is a JPG.
- fuckyah 3y ago
  [dead]
wideroots 3y ago
This doesn't explain the case when the author uploaded and downloaded a new file, and there was no big diff in file size. The file size diff only seems to be happening to the author's older video files.
- InsomniacL 3y ago
  It does explain it and likely adds more weight to it too. Encoding additional videos takes a lot of processing power. When you upload a video to youtube, the higher-quality versions aren't available for sometime. There is likely a queuing system, maybe even a minimum weight time before a video is processed.
3y ago

sliq 3y ago

Can confirm, have some ideas: Apple uses different file formats "internally" and also different resolutions, maybe saving them all in parallel as "one" video, which might cause this issue. So the total space per image is actually the sum of original .mov, optimized .mp4 and thumbnail image. Also, (automated) version history might have caused this! Maybe (automatic) image optimiztion saved old and new versions of everything.

sandreas 3y ago

That's one of the reasons I self-host. I just don't trust the cloud providers regarding clarity and transparency... even if my self-hosted solution was far less reliable, less secure and less performant (I imagine it's not ;), I probably wouldn't change. I personally use immich[1], a very complete solution with iOS / Android App, Server-Component and Sync / Backup option. [1]: https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/

Alifatisk 3y ago
It looks interesting but the warning at the top tells me I should wait for it to become more stable?
- rscrawfo 3y ago
  I would if you want to use it as backup. But if you just use it to display photos and have another process for sync it’s absolutely fantastic! To me it’s better than any other interface I’ve tried. Commercial or home lab.
- sandreas 3y ago
  Yeah, that's what I thought... but using it for 6 months now they have been pretty reliable regarding upgrades and new features. The features I appreciate the most are: - Auto-Synchronisation on Android AND iOS (this is hard to find in any other app) - Photo sharing (Accounts can have partners to share all their photos with - ideal for me and my wife) - Deduplication - The Web Interface The feature I miss the most is tags[1]. Once the app stopped working but there was a clear message on the repository / homepage that the server has to be upgraded. Since it is docker based, it was very easy to upgrade without losing any data. Same applies for backup... So if you ask me, there is no need to worry - but I would not use it as only option to store my photos and it does not replace an (off-site)-backup. [1]: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1651#discussioncomment-7469863 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/1651#discus...
brlewis 3y ago
I think Apple just hasn't realized yet what a great sales opportunity a UI for quota management is. There's no better place to sell more storage. That's what Google does. See https://one.google.com/storage https://one.google.com/storage and https://photos.google.com/quotamanagement https://photos.google.com/quotamanagement which work well for finding stuff to delete, in the hopes that eventually you'll tire of deleting things and go ahead and buy more storage.

sccxy 3y ago

iCloud backup is real mess. Free 5GB is not enough for backing up iPhone system data any more. Most insane is that if you remove some apps from backup, then it iCloud usage goes from 4.5GB to 4.6GB.

wideroots 3y ago
and you're basically given to choose either stop backing up your iMessage or pay $1/mo for the extra 50gb

alephnan 3y ago

Don’t you remember how painful it was to import/export an mp3 file into an IPod? It was especially painful on a Windows PC. The biggest selling point of other mp3 players for me was the ability to transparently copy and paste files into the filesystem.

Alifatisk 3y ago

I've tried iCloud, Onedrive, Google Photos. Out of all these three, I stuck with Google Photos on my Iphone. iClouds bad pricing and storage issues led me to switch to Google Photos, It's way better. The lack of native support on iOS can be a little cumbersome though. The only thing I wish these cloud providers offered was a way to deduplicate photos / videos. That would make my life so much easier.

Liftyee 3y ago
> The only thing I wish these cloud providers offered was a way to deduplicate photos / videos. Same here ... but of course that would make it easier for customers to not have to pay more, so sadly don't think it's ever happening.
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  What makes it worse is even if you run a deduplication app on the folder your syncing to Google Photos, the synchronization is one way only, so the changes does not remove the duplicated items on Google Photos.
ezfe 3y ago
iCloud Photos has deduplication
- nytesky 3y ago
  Yeah I ran it and shrunk my library by half. It was kinda scary since I had 100000 photos, I couldn’t really inspect the process
  - treesknees 3y ago
    I've used an app called PhotoSweeper[1]. It can access your Photos library directly. You can manually review them side-by-side or let it run automatically. You can also set thresholds of % similarity to reduce false removals. I believe it can also move the duplicates into a separate album for review later. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photosweeper/id463362050?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photosweeper/id463362050?mt=12

lovegrenoble 3y ago

It's better to self-host

asdaq1312512 3y ago

Photos.app doesn't show file size… so I thought, why not build a little Photos.app extension or a separate app that queries for large files? Turns out that the API doesn't expose "file size", at least I didn't find a straight-forward way. I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video, it will be cropped and the smaller file size will manifest. I guess that's why the file sizes differ. [Edit: someone created an AppleScript to query file sizes - I didn't test it, yet: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000422 https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250000422 ]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
naltroc 3y ago
this is the best plausible reason for why the file size differs. I've also noticed some unepxected media restoration (thought I cropped/edited a video, it is still there in full length and resolution). This also helps explain why my iPhone storage always seems to be at its limits, despite my obsessive management. Anyway, we all know foss unix ftw :P
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > thought I cropped/edited a video, it is still there in full length and resolution It's been possible to create a clip from a video file that merely changes what parts of the video are displayed without effecting the data in the original since the Classic Mac OS days. If you want to completely remove unwanted portions of a video to reduce the size without a loss of quality, there are many options. LosslessCut is a cross platform option that is both free and open source. https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
alexwlchan 3y ago
> I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video, it will be cropped and the smaller file size will manifest. Yup, the Photos app keeps the unmodified original file, and then any edits/crops are stored separately. You can always revert to the original file and redo your edits. So they might be storing multiple copies of the same image, with and without edits. Which API were you looking at for "file size"? I was able to get the size data from Photos.app with the PhotoKit API [1]. I've only tested it with my library of ~26k items, but it was useful for getting an indicator of the biggest items. (Although I didn't think to check whether exporting a 1GB video caused my iCloud usage to drop by 1GB.) [1]: https://alexwlchan.net/2023/finding-big-photos/ https://alexwlchan.net/2023/finding-big-photos/

znpy 3y ago

I'm being sarcastic here, but the solution could be quite simple: iCloud is billing you (both in terms of storage size and money) for both your data and the redundant copies. Other companies would build the redundancy costs into the final pricing, but Apple is known to "think different".

Havoc 3y ago

Just discovered you can see file sizes for some items under > icloud > recommended for you Finds duplicates, screenshots and big vids. Had a random vid that was 1.8gb for reasons unknown Doesn't always seem to be a accessible though

aledalgrande 3y ago

In terms of iCloud cleanup, has anyone found a way to clean up iMessage attachments > x years old, greater than n MB or from certain contacts? It would clean up so much space for me. Apple only clears > 1 year old from the settings.

tugberkk 3y ago

Apart from the iCloud fiasco, I very much like these kind of programming. We generally lost the fun of it try to make enterprise/corporate programs, we forgot to use them for personal tasks.

FaridIO 3y ago

Additionally, if you take a 4MB photo and add it to a shared album with 5 people, those 5 people all have to use up 4MB from their storage. Instead of reusing the same image and having pointers to it, it looks like it's "copied".

carleton 3y ago
That doesn't make sense to me. Apple says here that photos in a shared album do not count against your iCloud storage. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786
arthurmorgan 3y ago
Shared Albums don't count against your iCloud Storage.

seffignoz 3y ago

Thanks for the idea/solution! I converted this into a TamperMonkey/Greasemonkey script. Also added a feature to "hide" all elements that do not match the threshold. https://github.com/seffignoz/icloudcleanup https://github.com/seffignoz/icloudcleanup

NDizzle 3y ago

With the iCloud desktop app for windows I'm able to sort by size...

crossroadsguy 3y ago

There’s will be a time when there will be many open (or relatively more open) devices like FairPhone et cetera; and OSes that do not track users and suffocate you with dark patterns and hostility all around - like Graphene and Lineage; and hopefully they’d all be able to join their hands together and not reimplement the wheels of N types for the 1000th time all incompatible with each other. Hope is that there will be services and softwares on top of that spec and API of these OSes that will be the user’s choice to pick - for contact, for calendar, SMS, IM, call , media, sync, backup, device account management etc. And such devices will be widely available, also in non-first world countries, with proper OEM warranties and support. Hell, a local manufacturer can just build for that spec. I know it’s like a wishful dream. But if this happens, and when this happens, I hope a lot of us will be able to breathe free and hopefully would be candidly able to shit upon legacies of those so called fucking visionaries, who were barely not subhuman and were just rather pathetic jerks, who ensured such shit-show of walled gardens and opaquely implemented utterly inferior systems where users go and get stuck in one of the two houses of the duopoly to experience a lot of shitty things including, but not limited to, some variation of Stockholm syndrome and clear and conscious apologism. Why? Because neither of the two is acceptably good and they have become so big and they have closed it down so much that nobody else can even make a dent even if they try. And they try! So yeah, until then I will rant and feel shitty about both my iPhone 14 (as they call it - my “daily driver”) and Pixel 5a (my bread and butter phone; form factor wise less shitty one though).

sneak 3y ago

Apple interested in maximizing recurring subscription revenue? You don’t say. I’m sure this is just a harmless bug and not the source of $20M extra revenue per year across their hundreds of millions of active iCloud users.

tamiral 3y ago

there is something weird happening on iCloud, my phone storage is off even though the total size of data isnt as big as it says, i throw a lot of .zip/rar files on icloud and it seems like the data on icloud is more than it is on my HDD....

867-5309 3y ago

some possible reasons to investigate: 1. older videos have a larger file size because they are encoded less efficiently (h264 vs h265) 2. gigabytes vs gibibytes (like how a 500GB drive formats to ~465 GiB) 3. rounding errors 4. Apple fucking its customers 5. combo of the above

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kossTKR 3y ago

Tangent but does anyone else find iCloud sync random / slow? The smart thing about having both an iPhone and a Macbook should potentially be; snap a bunch of photos, instantly have them available on the computer - but no. Apple apparently chooses a random time depending on 100 factors to upload the photos in the next 30 minutes to 7 days. So you often have to airdrop a bunch of photos files completely invalidating the purpose of the sync function.

SirMaster 3y ago

Can't you just use the Apple Shortcuts app to do a lot of this? Pretty sure that can enumerate and query things like the filesize of the photos and videos in your iCloud.

tamimio 3y ago

> Videos anonymized by slow internet loading I chuckled! I believe the size difference has to do with the encoding, can’t tell for a fact since you didn’t show that part, but maybe it gets re-encoded when you download it hence the difference.

baxtr 3y ago

Slightly off topic: anyone know how to backup iCloud data (mainly photos and videos, but also notes) to an outside platform? I’m an Apple fan, but still don’t like the idea of having all my digital life on iCloud only.

acheron 3y ago
Disclaimer I haven't tried this yet, but I found this project recently that supposedly downloads all iCloud photos (e.g. to a NAS for local backup). https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
- fckgw 3y ago
  I've been using a version of this for Unraid for over a year. Downloads everything from my iCloud storage to my home server. You need to re-authenticate every 90 days due to 2fa restrictions but it works great.
BigBalli 3y ago
I use Image Capture with my phone plugged in to save them on an external hard drive.
AnonC 3y ago
This is not for incremental backups but for all data tied to your Apple ID — Apple provides a data download option to get your contacts, photos, videos and a whole lot of other data. You can visit this KB [1] for details and instructions. There are some exclusions, like data that’s end-to-end encrypted. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208

BigBalli 3y ago

Was the video with size mismatch edited? Apple keeps both versions (same goes for photos, they include image and MOV for live photos).

very_good_man 3y ago

Apple needs to face criminal penalties for the dark patterns with which they prey upon their users.

spockz 3y ago

I’ve been on a similar hunt. My devices are littered with copies of videos that were shared via iMessage, WhatsApp, and other means. Each of these apps then store the copy locally which then gets backed up in iCloud. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to automatically delete all the videos/photos that I send which still have the original in the photo stream. It would be awesome to be able to automate that.

treesknees 3y ago
This isn't perfect, nor automated, but you can search the Messages app for photos/videos and delete them all. Assuming you've saved them already, this should clear up some iCloud space. https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-use-smart-search-filters-in-messages-on-iphone/ https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-use-smart-search-filters-i... https://www.igeeksblog.com/delete-multiple-imessage-photos-attachments-on-iphone/ https://www.igeeksblog.com/delete-multiple-imessage-photos-a...

godzillabrennus 3y ago

It seems like a giant class action lawsuit with a juicy target if Apple is overbilling customers on usage for videos in iCloud. I know lots of people paying for more storage in iCloud would appreciate the reprieve of lower costs.

sroussey 3y ago

I need a good way to cleanup a gmail account…

raz32dust 3y ago

I am so tired of these patterns. Google Photos also does not allow any easy or good way to clean up junk. Why would they? They want you to run out of space so you can pay for their cloud storage. They also have low incentive to keep photo/video storage space-efficient for the same reason.

shreezus 3y ago

On this topic...anyone know the best way to export an entire iCloud Photo Library at full resolution?

simplezeal 3y ago
If you have a Macbook, you can sync iCloud library at full resolution using Photos app and then export.
meinheld111 3y ago
There is an export service that returns a archive

orenlindsey 3y ago

Interesting, also, Apple should make a mid-tier of iCloud. If they had a 500gb (or 400 or whatever) they could have gotten this guy to pay more.

ComputerGuru 3y ago
At the cost of many others not buying the more expensive plan because it was their only option.
- mmikeff 3y ago
  Surely there are plenty of us who would happily (or at least less reluctantly) pay incrementally more as our storage needs increase, but who baulk at trebling what we pay in one jump.

mmikeff 3y ago

The thing that is taking up loads of my iCloud storage is the 'live' video version of photos where the tiny snippet of movement has a larger filesize than the photo that it accompanies. The only way I have found so far to deal with this is to download the files locally, delete from iCloud, delete the local videos and upload the remaining still images. This is time consuming, clunky and makes me nervous that I'll delete something or lose something important in the process. Is there anything out the that help to automate that process but where there is some level of editorial control so that I can identify and keep the handful of 'live' images that I might actually want to keep?