Need help validating steps to free up storage on iPhone by removing iCloud Photos and re-syncing in the future

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Hey all,

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time exploring options to mitigate storage woes on a new iPhone. I’ll give the quick summary version of my issue and steps I want to take to resolve it and need help validating from experts in this community that this solution route is possible and not fraught with bear traps or issues.

TL;DR Version
iPhone system data and Photos indexing are maxing out new 17 Pro 256gig phone storage, need a temporary solution until the 18s come out and we get one with a much bigger storage drive.

Issue:

-My wife’s Photos library is massive, 300k photos/14k videos it is all synced to iCloud
-We got her a new iPhone (12 Pro → 17 Pro 256gigs)
-The problem: The 17 is having issues indexing and caching files from iCloud for her photos library, the storage is always full due to system data caching so it’s choking the phone.
-Syncing is working fine, photos are still being uploaded but the caching and indexing of the massive library is taking way too long and choking the storage creating a bunch of different issues
-Yes, Optimize iPhone Storage is active on all devices and has been
-Funny enough the iPhone 12 Pro is fine, it’s sitting at about 200 of 256 gigs used for everything on the phone because it had so much time to index and cache the photos over the last 6 years (I digress)

The Plan and steps I need help validating will resolve this issue:

Goals:
-Free up the 100+ gigs that Photos says its using on the 17 by disabling iCloud Photos Sync and Remove Photos from Phone (keep everything in the iCloud)
-Allow photos to be taken on the 17s local storage
-When we get her a new 18 Pro 1TB re-enable iCloud Photos to sync iCloud library and merge local photos into the iCloud library

Steps I need to help validating:

-Turn off iCloud Photos and Remove all Photos from the 17 (keep everything in the iCloud)
-Any new pictures taken will be stored locally on the phone (option to manually upload to iCloud if need be)
-After we get a new 18 Pro 1TB and have transferred all data from the 17 re-enable iCloud Photos Sync

So the things I want to triple check:

  1. ⁠Disabling iCloud Photos Sync on the 17 and removing from the phone will not touch any stored pictures in the iCloud (understanding that they need to be synced first)

  2. ⁠Re-enabling iCloud Photos Sync on the 18 after a data transfer. I want to triple check that this will not wipe the iCloud Photos library that it will properly merge with the local library on the phone with the iCloud, cache and index the Optimized versions of the photos (with that option selected before turning the sync back on)

Thank you if you took the time to read this thread and respond, really appreciate it I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to find a solution to this problem.

1 Like
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Welcome. I’m hoping you get some advice as I would like to do something similar.

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Does your wife have a Mac?

If you transferred all photos to the Cloud on the iPhone 12, then they should all be there if you switch Photos in the Cloud off on the iPhone 17.

Any phone is going to have similar issues (although extra space will help) as Photos needs to download each photo to analyse it. So even with 1TB it’s still going to take a heck of a long time to do the initial processing.

After switching Photos in the Cloud off on the 17, you could potentially use Image Capture to transfer photos off the phone to the Mac’s Photos to allow upload to Photos in the cloud.

Hopefully you’re aware that Storage is especially expensive at the moment, so an iPhone 18 is likely going to cost a lot more for 1TB of storage than the current 17. Would a 17 Pro with the same storage be more cost effective of you (if money is a constraint)

Switching on Photos in the Cloud should sync with what’s in the cloud, but it’s worth taking a backup (on a Mac) before you turn it on.

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Also thinking about it, another option may be (again you’ll need a Mac) split the library into two separate libraries, or archive some photos and videos if your Wife doesn’t need to see all of her photos on the iPhone.

The reason the 12 coped and the 17 doesn’t is likely due to the library being much smaller when your wife started using it and being able to cope with that smaller library then. Gradual incremental additions are processed every night after being added. I’ve seen this other types of systems which cope fine as they grow, but when there’s a need to rebuild or restore the system, the system can’t cope.

So a smaller library could work before adding the photos back into the system library bit by bit.

Just a thought.