Saving money: Reduce your storage - the quick wins

Halve your storage needs

After analysing the photo library of some of my friends who are fairly ‘typical’ users of Apple Photos, I believe that most people can at least halve the size of their Apple photo/video storage while improving their photo collection. Here’s how to do it yourself. Alternatively, you could get someone else to help you - this is covered under Shared Library.

Videos

As you probably know, video files are much large than photo files. Depending on the quality of your iPhone camera, a 10 second video is approximate 12Mb whereas most photos are normally between 2-4Mb. So the first place to save storage is with your videos.

Step 1:  Delete the ones you no longer want. It’s amazing what you find when you watch your videos again. You often wonder why you ever kept it!

Step 2: Trim the ones which are too long. Unless your video is of a particular event, such as your child’s music performance, it can probably be reduced drastically to capture the just main action.

Step 3: Move the videos to a Shared Album and delete the originals. Shared Albums don’t have to be shared with anyone and don’t count toward your iCloud storage. Therefore by moving large videos to a Shared Album and deleting the originals  from your library you can save a huge amount of storage.

When you move the videos - which must be less than 15 mins each - Apple compresses them and so their quality will reduce slightly. You also won’t be able to undo any changes you made previously. For most home videos, the reduced quality will be perfectly good enough to enjoy the memory even on a large TV screen. However, if you don’t want to reduce their quality or lose your changes you will need to either pay for the iCloud storage needed or export them to an external drive. Personally I export my older videos to a hard drive and also keep them in a Shared Album which you can access at any time on any of your Apple devices. The more recent ones I keep in my library until I get near my storage limit.

Another option is to use Step 3 as a compression tool and move the videos back to your library! However, leave your videos in your Shared Library for a few hours to compress before moving them back - they don’t appear to be compressed instantly.

Duplicate Photos

This is a quick win but won’t normally save much storage space. You may not have any identical duplicates in your library but if you have, there is a simple way to find and ‘merge’ them. Merge basically means deleting the lower quality copy if there is one. In the Photos App, open the Utilities collection. If you have any duplicates you will see a menu called ‘Duplicates’ underneath ‘Recently Deleted’.

Admin Photos

Admin photos are photos of things like something you see in a shop to use a reminder, or photos of an item you’re planning to sell online. They’re basically photos that you don’t really want others to see when you’re scrolling through your library showing off your holiday pictures or pictures of the family.

Step1 : Hide them. Putting them in the hidden album makes them easier to find and hides them from your main library. You can hide any photo by opening it, tapping the 3 dots in the top-right and tapping ‘Hide’. You can also select multiple photos and then hide them. This step doesn’t save on storage.

Step 2: Delete out-of-date ones. Every now and then you can go back through the hidden album and delete the old ones you no longer need to refer back to.

Step 3: Move the videos to a Shared Album and delete the originals. Shared Albums don’t have to be shared with anyone and don’t count toward your iCloud storage. Therefore by moving photos to a Shared Album and deleting the originals from your library you can save on storage.

You could skip steps 1 & 2 and move admin photos straight to a shared album. The reason I suggest steps 1 & 2 is to save time. Hiding photos takes fewer clicks than moving them and deleting the originals, and so I only move them when I’m running out of storage.

When you move the photos, Apple compresses them and so their quality will reduce slightly. You also won’t be able to undo any changes you made previously. However as these are admin photos, the slightly reduced quality should not be a problem.

Slow wins article coming soon.