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Context

I am transferring all my data from an iphone X to iphone 14 pro.

I was about to wipe the iphone X , when I did a last second comparison to make sure that the data was correct on both phones and noticed this anomaly:Same Number of Photos but Different Total Storage ( Please see photos attached)

  1. They both have optimize storage on
  2. I looked at identical image and video sizes and they are the same for the 5 I looked at
  3. There are a ton of images that are duplicates, specifically screenshots

Question Could newer IOS 16 have the ability to downsample or detect the duplicates? If so, how would the image and video counts stay the same? What would cause the phone to truncate the photos by a third?

Total Storage Size

Total Storage Count

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  • Are you using iCloud to sync/share photos?
    – Allan
    Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 23:52
  • In general yes, but to sync the photos I just used Apple's "Quick start"
    – Ted Taylor of Life
    Commented Feb 17, 2023 at 2:03
  • You may have more locally stored photos on your old iPhone than on the new one
    – tama
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 0:24

2 Answers 2

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+100

As you have optimize storage enabled, the storage difference could be the result of the old phone having more photos downloaded in full resolution than the new one.

OTOH, your iCloud storage is full so not all photos may have been uploaded. One way out of this is to increase storage, disable Airplane mode on the old phone and let it sync with iCloud again.

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  • What if both devices have optimize storage enabled? So you are explicitly stating that the newer iphone has already uploaded the higher resolution photos to the cloud? The difference is quite drastic. It is almost 40gb difference... the syncing is paused on both devices as storage is full. I will increase the amount and see what happens.
    – Ted Taylor of Life
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 14:41
  • @TedTaylorofLife I'm not saying that. The high quality pictures got transfered from the old phone to the cloud (and the old phone is offline so it can't show cloud storage status). Both phones have all the low-quality pics, what is currently unknown is whether all high-quality pics got transfered from the old phone to iCloud.
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 15:26
  • "Optimize storage" just means that iOS removes the high-quality picture if storage on the phone gets low. So your old phone could have a lot of high quality pictures on the device. The new one only got the low-quality ones via the direct transfer quickstart does (just tap on a few to check whether it triggers a download).
    – nohillside ♦
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 15:28
  • Thank you again for your help. For the record, we could not figure out the discrepancies in the data storage sizes for each app. We have gone with your hypothesis of the the full size of the photo being stored in the icloud and not on the device. The photo counts were identical, but 12gbs smaller. Thank you again for all your help and I hope this helps someone in the future. I cannot stand apple products.
    – Ted Taylor of Life
    Commented Feb 23, 2023 at 2:36
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It's not that IOS 16. can compress its locally stored photos and videos more efficiently than previous versions, not to the degree you're experiencing, it's that your new iPhone doesn't have as much storage that your previous model had.

Since the transfer isn't complete yet you don't have all of your past photos and videos on your new phone, yet. Since your iCloud storage is full you would either have to backup the files you already have saved there elsewhere and then resume the backup via your iPhone. Or you could delete some apps or perhaps some other file on your new iPhone to free up some storage locally. If not, there's also the option of upgrading your subscription plan at Apple, so that you'll receive more cloud storage.

Unless you're certain that your new iPhone should at least have the same, or a larger amount of storage room on your new iPhone? Then you should be able to just transfer the old data directly to your new iPhone and just skip the iCloud backup storage, for now at least. It's either a lack of storage on your new iPhone and on your iCloud, or that during set up a setting may have made switched so that it would prefer cloud over local storage.

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  • The newer device has double the local storage of the old phone. iphone 14 pro is 512 vs 256gb of X. What do you think are the drastic differences in the "photos" app memory size of 67.72gb (iphone pro 14) vs 24.87gb ( iphone x)
    – Ted Taylor of Life
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 14:44

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