How to make photos take up less space on the iPhone

Photos are an essential part of how we use our iPhones. From travel memories to everyday moments, each image tells a story. Keeping too many images on our device can quickly take up space. Fortunately, Apple allows us to manage all our photos without sacrificing quality or using up all the space on our iPhone. Let’s see how we can make our photos take up less space and keep our iPhone in optimal condition.

Optimize photo storage on iPhone

Our ally when it comes to managing the storage space of Photos is “Optimize Storage.” This feature allows iCloud Photos, Apple’s cloud, to securely take care of safeguarding all our photos, preventing them from taking up virtually any space on our iPhone. The steps to activate this feature are as simple as these:

1. We open the Settings app on our iPhone.
2. We enter the Photos section (within Apps if we are running iOS 18 or later).
3. If it’s not, we activate iCloud Photos.
4. We select the option Optimize iPhone Storage.

With this setup, our high-resolution photos are stored in iCloud, while an optimized version is kept on the iPhone. When we need the image in its highest quality, we just have to open it for it to download from the cloud without us even noticing.

iCloud Photos relies on our iCloud space. Remember here that Apple offers us several storage plans, from 50 GB for 0.99 euros per month or 200 GB for 2.99, up to 12 TB —for a library of several million photos, it should be added— for 59.99 euros per month.

With the right plan, we will no longer necessarily have to aim for an iPhone with more storage when we visit an Apple Store. Apple’s cloud —remembering that we can transfer all our photos from Google Photos to iCloud— will take care of safeguarding all our photos and keeping them available on our iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro without taking up practically any space on the device.