{"id":48527,"date":"2025-07-17T14:15:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T18:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=48527"},"modified":"2025-07-30T10:26:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T14:26:03","slug":"fixing-optimize-storage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/17\/fixing-optimize-storage\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing &ldquo;Optimize Storage&rdquo;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/rjonesy\/status\/1945132365761679793\">Ryan Jones<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/x.com\/rjonesy\/status\/1945132365761679793\"><p>I am so out of patience for &ldquo;Optimize Storage&rdquo; on Apple devices.<\/p><p>Now I have to take half my day to figure out how to reduce Photos and Messages without nuking them.<\/p><p>My best solution: Disconnect iCloud Photos. That will delete all local photo copies. Then reconnect it. &#x1F937;&#x200D;&#x2642;&#xFE0F;<\/p><p>That worked. All local photos were offloaded.<\/p><p><em>Except for the Shared With You<\/em> stuff from Messages.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/ajrgd\/status\/1945134173955444798\">Alex Greenland<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/x.com\/ajrgd\/status\/1945134173955444798\"><p>Yesss! My biggest gripe. With Photos and iCloud Drive on macOS and iOS.<\/p><p>&ldquo;Optimise Storage&rdquo; should leave me with comfortable space, not just leaving me a few gigs of headroom.<\/p><p>It&rsquo;s like it tries to fill up your disk first, then takes files away, but never enough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>I think both Photos and Messages should have settings to specify the number of GB to cache locally.<\/p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/spreen_co\/status\/1945313953317343460\">Nick Spreen<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/x.com\/spreen_co\/status\/1945313953317343460\"><p>I feel like that&rsquo;s not really a problem in comparison to 300gb system data<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/23\/deleting-unused-photos-from-apple-photos\/\">Deleting Unused Photos From Apple Photos<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/03\/deleting-messages-attachments-everywhere\/\">Deleting Messages Attachments Everywhere<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/12\/dont-let-me-go-and-icloud-storage-tiers\/\">&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t Let Me Go&rdquo; and iCloud Storage Tiers<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/07\/showing-the-amount-of-free-space-on-ios\/\">Showing the Amount of Free Space on iOS<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/05\/pruning-ios-system-data\/\">Pruning iOS &ldquo;System Data&rdquo;<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/25\/photos-needs-better-storage-management\/\">Photos Needs Better Storage Management<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/07\/protecting-your-network-from-photos-uploads\/\">Protecting Your Network From Photos Uploads<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p id=\"fixing-optimize-storage-update-2025-07-25\">Update (<a href=\"#fixing-optimize-storage-update-2025-07-25\">2025-07-25<\/a>): <a href=\"https:\/\/pxlnv.com\/linklog\/fixing-optimize-storage\/\">Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/pxlnv.com\/linklog\/fixing-optimize-storage\/\">\n<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.macrumors.com\/2023\/07\/25\/apple-my-photo-stream-shutdown-what-to-do\/\">My Photo Stream<\/a>, 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 &mdash; that I do not need to keep everything on-disk?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Yes, Messages seems to&mdash;contra Photos&mdash;treat the local storage as a cache that never evicts anything. So it doesn&rsquo;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.<\/p>\n\n<p id=\"fixing-optimize-storage-update-2025-07-30\">Update (<a href=\"#fixing-optimize-storage-update-2025-07-30\">2025-07-30<\/a>): <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/krzyzanowskim\/status\/1950263872557826240\">Marcin Krzyzanowski<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/x.com\/krzyzanowskim\/status\/1950263872557826240\"><p>the system is rigged. I don&rsquo;t know how to free more space without disabling iCloud Photos completely because it won&rsquo;t delete photos not matter what.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ryan Jones: I am so out of patience for &ldquo;Optimize Storage&rdquo; 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. &#x1F937;&#x200D;&#x2642;&#xFE0F;That worked. All local photos were offloaded.Except [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-07-17T18:15:13Z","apple_news_api_id":"a861289b-1c24-48b9-850e-254cb01c8c6d","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-07-30T14:26:05Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AqGEomxwkSLmFDiVMsByMbQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[16,1142,31,2586,30,2598,2237,141,927,174],"class_list":["post-48527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-icloud","tag-icloud-photo-library","tag-ios","tag-ios-18","tag-mac","tag-macos-15-sequoia","tag-messages-in-icloud","tag-messages","tag-photos-app","tag-storage"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48527"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48710,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48527\/revisions\/48710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}