iPhone Photos taking up too much space despite iCloud sync being turned on?

iCloud is a synchronization service, not offline storage. Anything in iCloud is also on your device. When you sync photos your originals are uploaded to iCloud and kept on your devices. Should you elect to optimize storage, lower-res images are kept on device and the originals retained in iCloud.

Your library appears to be about 167GB in iCloud. Most optimization can get the library to around 10 to 15 percent in size. The exact details vary by the number of pictures and videos in your account, the device that you’re using, the image resolutions of the original, etc. but nothing looks amiss.

ambrustorok wrote:

Is Apple purposefully keeping my phone storage full so I am forced to buy a newer model with more storage? Because I literally can not come up with a better explanation at this point, or a solution to making more space on my phone.

No, Apple doesn't conive to get you to buy up. You did that by buying the smallest storage available on the iPhone at the time of purchase and then outgrowing the capacity of the iPhone's storage. If you don't have a desktop Mac where you can store the photos and only have a subset on your iPhone then you'll need to get an iPhone that has adequate storage for you. The current max storage is 512 GB.

If you have a desktop Mac many users have a full library on it and then have a smaller, System Photos Library and iCloud Library with the more important Photos syncing between devices.

I don’t know if this is the identical issue, but I too was having phantom storage problems stemming from Photos. I do not use iCloud Photos. I uninstalled VLC and all subsequent MKV files and the situation immediately resolved itself.

Hope this helps.

You are trying to use "iCloud Photos" like an external drive to extend the storage of your iPhone. But even fully optimized, your iCloud Photos will need some storage on your iPhone. As a rule of thumb, any item you are keeping in iCloud Photos will optimized need at least 10% to 20% of its original size on your iPhone. This is needed for the thumbnails and the database files describing the folders, adjustments, albums. metadata like faces and places.

With an iCloud Photos Library of 167GB, you are close to the limit how large you can let your Photos Library grow. If you try to let the iCloud Photos Library grow much larger beyond this, Photos will become painfully slow and you may encounter blank thumbnails, because Photos cannot even create thumbnails for browsing for all items in iCloud. The local storage on your device available for optimized versions is the bottleneck, determinining how large your iCloud Photos Library can grow.

When I still have been using my old iPhone 5s with just 64GB storage, my iCloud Photos Library with 200GB (at that time) needed fully optimized 25GB on the iPhone. Photos has still been responsive and still left me enough storage for the other apps and my music.

Like muguy recommended, keep the iCloud Photos Library small. I am only keeping my favorites and most important photos and the most recent new photos in iCloud Photos, only the photos I want to have with me at all times. On my Mac I am keeping several additional Photos Libraries, where I am archiving all my Photos, one Photos Library for each year, and one for each major event, like an extended vacation or photo safari. This way I can easily find older photos, if I need to look them up.

You do not necessarily need a Mac to archive your photos. Do you already have a computer with software to organize photos?

I just upgraded to 6TB iCloud storage and even with optimizing photo storage, the cloud is dumping ALL of my photos from previous phones onto my phone, which only has 256 g - what is the ratio for how much “optimized for space” photo/videos are compared to full size? It seems like even if all of the photos and videos in the iCloud are optimized, they still take up more space than my phone has….so what exactly is the point of upgrading iCloud storage?

Your library appears optimized. If you need space, you’ll need to delete items or purchase a larger device 64GB isn’t that much.

You'll need to set it up on the Mac. I don't use iCloud Library so can't walk your thru the process.