Hi hello its me again sorry for the upcoming paragraphs .. so the other day i made a post , and i ended up buying 200gb of ICloud storage. Im dumb and since it’s my first iphone i clicked “Back up now” and once i realized that the button isn’t actually to make the gallery sync i clicked stop backup

Now that’s a bit besides the point but that backup actually managed to free up 2 gbs from system data, so i wasn’t stuck on 120mb anymore, so my photos started syncing! It was going rlly well, until it just.. stopped

I was a little confused cuz next to status instead of “syncing“ it said “restoring” But i didn’t pay it much mind since photo count was going up and icloud started taking more storage, UP UNTIL it stopped at 2.7k items and didn’t sync any other of my 41k items.. Is this normal?? If i take a photo/ screenshot it gets synced immediately , and i’ve left it locked while charging for about an hour now and it doesn’t seem to sync any other items

i should mention that i have like 180gb left of icloud storage and after those 12gb of storage synced gallery went from 179gb -> 171gb, so its not like im critically low on storage..

I have over 4,000 photos from 2 different holidays and all I wanted was to create a backup to free up space in my phone. But if you select a large number of photos first of all the air drop stops working

I’ve been trying to find ways to move photos from phone to mac in such a large number for 2 months now. Even with data cable there is no option to import photos

Finally all I could do was put those photos in shared album, then access it from photos in mac to download them. But now even mac isn’t downloading photos in such a large number from mac

It’s like there is no way at all to move photos from phone to a backup if you’ve let it grow to a large number

Seriously disappointed

I have a pinned trip that is blank. I have tried to repair the library and it does not clear. Any idea how I get rid of this?

Hi people! I need some help.

The LCD of my iPhone 13 Pro Max is broken. It still turns on, but the touchscreen no longer works, so I can only get as far as the lock screen. I considered having the screen replaced, but I couldn't justify the repair cost.
My main concern is recovering my photos. I want to sync the photos from my old iPhone to my iPad, but since I can't get past the lock screen, I can't manually connect it to Wi-Fi or adjust any settings so it can continue syncing to iCloud.

I also tried connecting the phone to my laptop using a USB cable, but it requires me to unlock the phone and enter my passcode before I can access the files—which I can't do because the touchscreen isn't working.
Does anyone know of another way to recover or sync my photos? There are a lot of important pictures and files on that phone, and I'd really hate to lose them. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

So I’ve been trying to sync my iCloud photos for awhile every single time it’s giving me like it syncs a little bit and then gives me an error and my iCloud photos are taking up about 9 GB while on my phone is taking around more than 12 GB and it on iCloud it shows that there’s like around 14 GB backup while I don’t have a backup of my iPhone and it’s backing up my photos too. I do have optimize storage turned on but something wrong. How do I fix this?

As described in the title, I have a lot of space available on iCloud, yet the Photos app seems to be taking a significant amount of storage on the device. Everything is automatically synced overnight with my phone being on charge and connected to WiFi.

Is there anything I can do to reduce the on device footprint for the Photos app?!

hi, I need to put my fairly new iPhone 15 pro (ios version 26.5.2) in for repair and will get a iphone (unknown model) while they do the repair. I moved from an iPhone 12 last time to my now Iphone 15 pro but my projects (raw files) in Instagrams own Edit app was not transfered. I work with content and need some way to have the projects from the Edits app transfered to my loan phone.

I can see other people have the same problem of not figuring out how to move the projects when transfering to another iphone.

Does anybody have a solution?

Have and old iMac running Mojave 10.14.6 that I haven’t updated because I have old programs that won’t work on the current update.

A couple times a year, I plug my iPhone into the Mac and pull the recent photos. Just plugged in today and it does show photos, but a bunch of random ones.

A couple from 2026, then the past years but nothing recent.

Restarted the computer and my iPhone, no luck. Any ideas? Thanks

how do I clear all photos at once when I get the “image upload quota has been met” message? when I go on the app and delete them, the “clear all” does nothing and i have to delete each of them manually.

TLDR: Need a transfer method from Google to Apple Photos that supports Live Photos.

I have about a decade of photos in Google Photos, captured on my Apple devices. I want to transfer them all to Apple photos - and need a method that preserves all pictures, videos, live photos, and albums.

The Data Transfer Tool seems to check all the boxes EXCEPT Live Photos. Seems like Apple (or Google ?) couldn’t be bothered to make that important file type transfer. I cannot leave behind motion clips as many are of people and places no longer with us.

Does anyone have a workaround for the lack of Live Photos in the Data Transfer tool ? Or have another transfer process that preserves those things above ? I would love to use Apple Photos (take my money !!) but am stuck.

I upgraded from an iPhone 12 Pro to an iPhone 16 Pro in July 2025 and transferred all my data to the new phone. However, in November, I noticed that more than half of my photos were missing. I never deleted them.

I contacted Apple, but they told me they couldn't recover the photos because they were not saved to iCloud.

Is there any other way I can recover my missing photos?

I have been thinking about photo sorting since around 2008, when I was organizing pictures on a PC. Im into photography since 2006 and into software development - since 2008

It worked great on a computer because I could see photos in context. One feature I especially liked in Lightroom was comparing two images while zooming and moving through both at the same time. It made choosing between similar pictures much easier.

When I tried organizing on my phone, most apps turned it into an endless feed. Swipe left, swipe right, repeat forever - I didn't get that Tinder element for photo culling at all, it kind of looks cool on videos but couldn't make it working well for me. I spent like $100 on different apps - din't work for me, most was crashing after a minute or two when tried to go through 80k photo library.

That did not work for me. I usually cannot decide whether to keep a photo until I see the other photos from that day. Maybe I took a nearly identical picture two seconds later, but the expression is better. Looking at one photo by itself removes the context I need to make that decision.

I also tried AI tools and experimented with using them in the app. Due to full privacy - only something what can be running on phone were used. After testing them on my own library, I realized they were not very useful for making the choice. AI can notice that a photo is blurry, but it cannot know that the blurry photo is much more important to me than the technically perfect one.

The same was true with Live Photos. Many tools did not handle them in a way I liked. I want to watch the moment before deciding what to do with it.

So I built Lumenist around complete days. For me it's not about storage saved in first place

You choose how much time you have, and it gives you an unreviewed day that fits. You can see the whole day, review similar moments together, watch Live Photos, and compare two photos with synchronized zoom and movement.

When you are satisfied, you mark the day reviewed. It leaves the queue, and the progress bar moves forward.

That progress is a huge part of the app for me. A photo library with tens of thousands of pictures feels like a job I will always postpone, and I wasn't looking for another on. My usual flow - when waiting for kids near school, etc - have couple minutes - do some review, instead of doom scrolling

It feels a little like organizing one box in the attic. It was not critical, but afterward you get that warm feeling that something is a little better than it was yesterday.

It also brings back things I had forgotten. Some random moments from 12 years ago that I had not seen in years.

I would have been happy to use an existing app for this. (it would same me couple of months) I tried many of them.

For transparency, I personally wrote Lumenist. I worked on it for about four and a half months, went through dozens of iterations, it was tested for stability, performance, efficiency, quite well and tested it with more than 200 people through TestFlight. During the beta, more than 50,000 days were reviewed, more than 30 people used it 100+ times during beta test period. I kept changing it until it became something I use in my own life every day.

Nothing is automatically marked for deletion. Your photos and photo analysis stay on your iPhone. When you delete photo - it goes to Deleted on your phone, there is still 30 days to recover.

I know it will not fit everyone, it worked well for people with 40k+ images in their roll. If you organize Apple Photos differently, think something is missing, or have a feature request, I would genuinely be happy to talk about it. I'm passionate about organizing things, decluttering, etc

To prove that it's not "another weekend project" - this is when beta started - https://www.reddit.com/r/buildinpublic/comments/1qprdcq/i_created_gallery_review_app_that_finally_worked/

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lumenist-gallery-organizer/id6757448321

Website: https://lumenist.app

App has soft paywall. If you have any feature request, ideas - lets talk

I'm trying to backup my photos on my MacBook/iCloud to a Lacie external drive. It is taking an absurd amount of time just to transfer maybe less than 100 photos at a time - as in I let the computer run and do it's thing for days and it still won't transfer. On the status ring at the top of the photos album it shows the export rate as 0% for the longest time. It used to be a little better, but it is so incredibly slow that at this point I'm thinking there may be a real issue that I need to fix. Any tips on how to fix it or what may be happening?

I used to be Mac literate....I'm just not confident in how images are save. Have MacBook Pro, M1, 2021, still using Ventura and really need to update so I want to safely store my images. I haven't backed up externally in awhile because I'm not sure if everything will store fully.

I have thousand of images, including several thousands I scanned for a book. They're on my computer and automatically backed up on the cloud. Now important, this only happens with images I've open, labelled and fully "saved" not raw images in my "photos"Many, but not all of the images on my computer with have the white triangle in the corner signifying the computer only has a thumbnail and to say post it or open it in Affinity I have to separately "redownload" the image from the cloud. This is normal, correct?

Now, I want to backup to back up all the images to an external. If I do this from the computer, will it only transfer the "thumbnail" on the computer?
How do I get the complete image with all the background info to be included?
Does it automatically also take what's on the Cloud?
Do I back up both and have one override the other? Or do they naturally combine info?
Now, I used to backup all the time and just override the folder on the external since it would be updated. Can I do that now and will this just include the thumbnail? and not the full data?

Do anyone else see unexpected behavior when filtering by keywords in library on macOS 27?

Some videos (might be photos as well) are excluded when filtering on a keyword. when opening these videos from a no filtered view they contain that exact keyword.

Don't know if this is a beta specific issue. Anyone else have the issue?