How to optimize iPhone storage after deleting photos

When you delete a photo (or video) in the Photos app, it goes to the Recently Deleted app for thirty days in case you change your mind. During that time, they still take up storage on your phone. If you know that you will definitely not need these items back and want to accelerate the recovery of storage, delete the items from Recently Deleted.

If iCloud Photos is enabled on this phone, the mismatch of photo count suggests that something is preventing it from doing a proper synchronization between the phone and the cloud. If iCloud Photos is not enabled, the mismatch means nothing.

markwmsn wrote:

When you delete a photo (or video) in the Photos app, it goes to the Recently Deleted app for thirty days in case you change your mind. During that time, they still take up storage on your phone. If you know that you will definitely not need these items back and want to accelerate the recovery of storage, delete the items from Recently Deleted.

If iCloud Photos is enabled on this phone, the mismatch of photo count suggests that something is preventing it from doing a proper synchronization between the phone and the cloud. If iCloud Photos is not enabled, the mismatch means nothing.

FWIW completely deleting numerous images might be quite laborious and slow. Maybe it is intentional so people do not very lightly delete and then regret doing so.

Just yesterday I had a "good" chance (*) to test this when I had 39 000 images to delete. I first tried to delete them via Sequoia Photos.app but "Syncing..." remained on the Photos.app screen for hours even after an initial 100 image delete test.

Uploading all images took one day (500 Mbps down/up fibre) so maybe I was just too impatient updating such largish library (just cancelling iCloud Photos might have also removed them after 30 days especially when I reduced iCloud from 2 TB to 200 GB for just iCloud Drive which works OK).

Anyway, I then decided to test if deleting from the upstream iCloud source is faster and went to the iCloud web site and deleted Photos there. But it is possible to delete only in 1000 image batches and after each delete the user has to wait about 30-60 seconds for a "save". And the same happens also when completely deleting the images from "Recently Deleted" where also only 1000 batch is allowed and it also lasts about 30-60 seconds for each batch.

(*) p.s. I just tried iCloud Photos family sharing with those 450 GB 36 000 images and 3000 movies with 2 TB iCloud account. Long story short: the user experience was not good so I reverted to the manual Finder sync to an 256 GB iPad although it can not hold that complete 450 GB Photos library so I have to sync only selected albums. Inviting family members to iCloud Photo sharing was flaky and in one user's iPhone 15 iOS 18 accepting the invitation screen repeatedly just vanished despite logging out/in iCloud and rebooting the iPhone. The final embarrassing culprit was when one user's all old personal iPhone images spilled to other users' shared images (she and other family members explicitly did not want that to happen unless manually enabled for selected new images. That did work for one user when tested, though) and the only way to stop it was to remove all family members (which takes about an hour) and remove shared family library (which takes about 2 hours -- creating and deleting a family shared library surprisingly takes a few hours even when my personal iCloud library is already set up). Maybe the explanation was that that user has not been able to accept new iCloud Terms & Conditions for months despite logging out/in iCloud and rebooting the iOS 16.7.11. ...does anyone remember similar MobileMe issues? /rant

What does Settings > General > iPhone Storage show you is using up all that storage? Look at both the bar graph at the top and the list of apps.

9,000 photos should not be using up most of 128GB. Do you have large videos? Is some other app using lots of space?