Fixing “Optimize Storage”
I am so out of patience for “Optimize Storage” on Apple devices.
Now I have to take half my day to figure out how to reduce Photos and Messages without nuking them.
My best solution: Disconnect iCloud Photos. That will delete all local photo copies. Then reconnect it. 🤷♂️
That worked. All local photos were offloaded.
Except for the Shared With You stuff from Messages.
Yesss! My biggest gripe. With Photos and iCloud Drive on macOS and iOS.
“Optimise Storage” should leave me with comfortable space, not just leaving me a few gigs of headroom.
It’s like it tries to fill up your disk first, then takes files away, but never enough.
I think both Photos and Messages should have settings to specify the number of GB to cache locally.
I feel like that’s not really a problem in comparison to 300gb system data
Previously:
- Deleting Unused Photos From Apple Photos
- Deleting Messages Attachments Everywhere
- “Don’t Let Me Go” and iCloud Storage Tiers
- Showing the Amount of Free Space on iOS
- Pruning iOS “System Data”
- Photos Needs Better Storage Management
- Protecting Your Network From Photos Uploads
Update (2025-07-25): Nick Heer:
As far as I can tell, my Messages cache on my iMac is a full copy of Messages in my iCloud account. It is not as though Apple is treating the cloud portion as merely a syncing solution, as it used to do with something like My Photo Stream, so it is not necessarily saving space in either my iCloud account or on my devices. I would like the option to store a full copy of my Messages history on my Mac, yes, but I also think it should more aggressively purge on-device copies. Is that not a key advantage of the cloud — that I do not need to keep everything on-disk?
Yes, Messages seems to—contra Photos—treat the local storage as a cache that never evicts anything. So it doesn’t start out as a full copy, but over time it can become one. It basically forces you to delete older messages (from everywhere) or buy a device with more storage.
Update (2025-07-30): Marcin Krzyzanowski:
the system is rigged. I don’t know how to free more space without disabling iCloud Photos completely because it won’t delete photos not matter what.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I do not trust apple’s software enough to use this option. Glad to hear that it doesn’t work reliably anyway. I recently took a photo with my camera that doesn’t show up I’m my photos album but was only accessible in the list of photos accessible via the camera app. 🤷♂️
There should be extra settings for it 1. How much storage to use as in many apps 2. Priority of photos/videos to store.
Common complain waiting for loading of a photo/video you just took.
Do message attachments ever get purged? It seems like they all end up in local storage, without even the option of optimizing storage, unless you delete them altogether.
