So now the photos have mixed their faces and in some photos that are both of these people it recognise them as one. I tried to select on some photos that there is one of these persons that “this is not (name of person) but it haven’t changed anything to all the other photos.

Fala rapaziada apaguei algumas fotos do meu iPhone em 2025 e agora estou precisando delas, porém não quero perder as fotos que tenho agora fazendo um backup e apagando tudo de 2025 pra frente, alguém pode me ajudar?

Sometimes i feel very irritated when my iPhone shows storage full and not let me use the other apps. I then delete some apps and then use it. Mostly it is filled with videos and photos. I have 2 gmail account and have taken backup there. Now there is no more space to take backup further. Is there any other free way available to take backup of my photos and videos to free up more space on my iPhone.

Ive been trying to get this video in my camera roll for like a week and I havent been able to because every time I try to save it it saves to files or nothing happens
Before I tried to save other longer videos (like ten minutes) but this one video Im trying to save is about three and I doubt its a problem with insufficient storage

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on this?

Backing up photos from my 16 Pro iPhone can take an unreasonably long time (sometimes hours, even for a single photo).

I can take a photo (or several), close the camera app, lock the phone, and pop it on charge.

20-30 mins later I go to access my Photos on my Mac and they aren't there.

Check the phone again and it still says 'Syncing X photos'.

This is whilst it's connected to my wifi (with 1gb internet), has a full battery, and is on charge.

It makes no difference if I open photos on the phone after taking them or not, and even after checking in on them 30-40 minutes later, it can still take tens of minutes (if not longer) before it actually syncs.

It claims it's actively syncing so there's no way to force it to sync immediately.

Surely this isn't the intended experience?

As an example, 30 minutes ago I took 6 photos, quite close together.

After 20 minutes, 2 of them suddenly synced. Since then (despite checking the app etc), none of the others backed up, then as I started writing this, one more backed up. It's not backing up the oldest of the photos first, nor is it backing up the smallest or largest of the photos first. But still not all of them have updated, and it was only 6 that needed syncing.

Hello family,

I have been on the iPhone since 2010 with the iPhone 4. I don’t take many photos and just transfer my photos from one device to the next over the years. So far I had around 30-50gb of photos on my iPhone 15 since 2010.

Ever since I had my son last October, my photos have doubled. I not have 80-90gb of photos and had to delete apps to keep up space for the new ones.

Currently I upgraded to the 17 since my moms phone was dying (SE 2020). With 256gb I have some space for a few months.

I need help to transfer my photos to an external HDD. Currently my pc I showing error every time I try to transfer photos so I’m doing batches.

I want a way to transfer the photos over WiFi and organise them on my pc like in a mac. I have a neo but it only have 512gb storage

I've got Ente, Dropbox, Vimeo, a Synology NAS.
At least 1T of photos, plus video.

I'm thinking of upgrading my iCloud, swapping out my Samsung phone for an iPhone and moving all my photos into iCloud. The iPhone would make adding a second camera for Zoom meetings a lot easier. (But Sambo Flip is super convenient, alas no telephoto lens...)

I see a lot of people here trying to get out of iCloud. But I have found it really hard to consolidate and de-dupe all of this. Need to simplify. Thoughts?

Hey,

I know some of you are already completely fed up with iPhone cleaner apps and probably know a dozen tricks and "life hacks" for cleaning up your photo library manually, so I’ll try to keep this short.

I make another iPhone gallery cleaner - PhotoBroom, and I’d be glad if you gave it a try.

What can it do (except the stuff the Photos app already can):

* finding similar photos, not just exact duplicates
* swiping through your library to quickly keep/delete photos
* finding large or short videos
* finding low-scored photos that may be worth reviewing

How it's different from the other apps: you can adjust thresholds in the settings (like similarity, "large/short" video size/length).

All your library is processed locally on your device, you can test it in Airplane Mode if you wish.

I heard from someone on this subreddit that the "fair price" for such apps is $10/y, so I made a discount promo code for reddit:

https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6757962299&code=REDDIT50

PhotoBroom is freemium, so you can try it first before buying it. If your photo library is modest you might be fine even with free limits. The code is valid for 10 days.

I'll be glad to hear any feedback or feature requests. If there's something you wish PhotoBroom (or Apple's Photos, lol) did differently, please let me know.

Can anyone recommend me a straightforward way to bulk-unsave photos in Instagram?

Thanks

So this has been happening for a bit, at first I thought it was my carelessness when mass deleting things for space, but I opened my phone this morning and a whole album of pictures of my grandpa had gone poof, missing. It was like, 30 pictures I took on my phone that I can’t retake because he is dead. I searched recently deleted, even hidden, did everything possible and still nothing.
I’m both bummed and very confused, because I do remember when I had an iPhone X, a whole album of my dog’s pictures just disappeared as well, at the time I chalked up to “second hand phone issues” but it stuck with me.
Over the years I had a few missing here and there, some chunks I couldn’t explain. In this same phone earlier in the year, I wanted to find pictures of my parents to post after a visit and they were also missing, from deleted and hidden.
Anyone can help/explain this? Thank you very much.

A few details: I currently have an iPhone 15, I don’t use iCloud for pictures. I also mention the hidden album a lot because when I first got an iPhone, I would somehow accidentally hide a lot of my pictures and be very sad thinking they were gone, so I always look there in case.

iPhone needs a Mission Impossible Screenshot shortcut.

You take the screenshot.
You post it/send it/whatever
It deletes from your phone in 30 seconds.

So, i have an issue with Apple Photos, many years ago i had using an iphone for my primary phone and i payed for more storage for keep my pictures there. When i changad again to Android i deleted my subscription to more storage but the pictures remained there. Now years after i have an iPhone SE3 and decided to download all the pictures and delete from iCloud, because it was used more than the 5GB.

The pictures and videos where downloading but since like barelly a month or so now the download is stuck in remaining 21 originals, is not because device storage or the wifi. it doesn't download anything, doesn't give an error.

Anyone can help me please to download all the pictures i had stored on the iCloud?

We share a 2TB iCloud Photos library as a family, and it filled up completely. iPhone backups stopped running, new photos and videos stopped appearing in the shared library, and every prompt pointed to the same place: upgrade to 6TB.

When I looked at what was actually taking the space, it was video — specifically long clips recorded at a much higher bitrate than the footage needed. The pixels weren't the problem. The bitrate was.

So I built LeanVid. It compresses videos by lowering only the bitrate — resolution, frame rate, colour, HDR and every audio track stay exactly as they were. Most compressors scale the video down, which is why the result looks worse. I wanted to see how far you could get without touching a single pixel dimension.

I ran it over our biggest videos and put the results back into the library. We're now sitting at about 1.8TB of 2TB and have stayed there. No 6TB upgrade, backups work again, and the shared library syncs normally.

A concrete example, and one I didn't plan on: App Review asked me to submit a screen recording of the app running on a real device. The recording came out at 3 minutes 34 seconds and 1.24 GB, which is awkward to attach anywhere. So I ran it through the app itself and sent the 99.4 MB result instead — about 92% smaller. That compressed file is what the reviewer watched, and the app passed on it. On a phone screen I genuinely cannot tell the two apart, and there's a side-by-side and slider comparison built in so you can check for yourself before deciding anything.

Since this touches your originals, the safety part mattered more to me than the compression. Before replacing an original it runs five checks — does the result play, does the track layout match, is the colour info intact, is the duration the same, is the file actually smaller. If any check fails, nothing is deleted. Deletion goes through the iOS system dialog, so the app can't quietly remove anything, and originals stay in Recently Deleted for 30 days.

Everything runs on device — no video is ever uploaded anywhere, which felt like the whole point given what I was trying to solve. Free, no account. It's ad supported.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6796710561

Happy to answer anything, including what it doesn't do well.

I love Apple Photos and iCloud for convenience.

But I kept coming back to one question:

Why should I need a Mac or PC just because I want a physical copy of my own photos?

Sometimes I don't want another cloud destination. I just want:

iPhone → USB/SSD → my photos.

That frustration is what made me build VaultDrive.

You connect a compatible USB drive or SSD directly to the iPhone, choose the photos/videos/files you want, and back them up from the phone.

The part that became much more important after talking with users was iCloud Photos.

If Optimize iPhone Storage is enabled, some originals may only be in iCloud.

VaultDrive can now:

• Download those iCloud-only originals before backing them up
• Let you choose Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + Cellular for those downloads
• Copy locally available photos directly to USB without uploading them to VaultDrive's cloud
• Keep the original files without intentional compression/re-encoding
• Preserve embedded photo/video metadata
• Keep useful source/folder organization on the drive
• Resume and skip items that were already copied

No Mac. No PC. No VaultDrive account.

I'm not trying to replace iCloud—I still think sync is incredibly useful.

I just think important photos deserve a second copy on something you physically control.

For anyone who wants to try it:

VaultDrive: USB Backup
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vaultdrive-usb-backup/id6772883827

I'm also running a 75% off Pro offer:
https://apps.apple.com/redeem/?ctx=offercodes&id=6772883827&code=WELCOME75

Curious about this community:

If Apple added one native feature to Photos tomorrow, would direct incremental backup to an external SSD be something you'd actually use?

Heya. I have a 17 pro and i have approx 10k photos and videos combined, and it takes about 130GB from my storage. I have no idea what to do, everything is synced up and optimisation for storage is on. My sister has about 20k photos with only her app storage taking up 5GB. What can i possibly do to reduce the size pf the app???

I realized something recently: I take a lot of photos, but unless I’m searching for a specific one, I almost never go back and actually browse through them.

Apple Photos is great for finding things, albums, memories, etc. But I was missing a really simple way to just… scroll through my own photos and randomly rediscover things I had completely forgotten about.

So I ended up making VertiRoll, which turns your photo library into a fullscreen vertical feed. You can choose an album and just swipe through random photos from it.

The main idea wasn’t really to create another photo manager — it was to make looking at old photos something I’d actually do again.

Curious how other people here handle this:
Do you regularly browse through old photos, or does most of your camera roll basically disappear after you take the picture?

If anyone wants to try it, here’s VertiRoll on the App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6786452410

I’d genuinely be interested in feedback, especially from people with really large photo libraries.

I’m a photographer, and I wanted to travel without bringing a laptop just to back up my memory cards.

So I built Fieldbox.

Just connect a card reader to your iPhone or iPad, choose the card, and Fieldbox copies the whole thing into an archive on your device. Every file is checked against the original with SHA-256 before it enters the archive.

From there, you can upload another copy to S3-compatible storage such as Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, or a WebDAV/NAS server. It also works offline, so you can make the local copy first and upload when you have a connection.

A few other things I wanted for my own shoots:

Browse and preview photos, including RAW and HEIC
Keep shoots organized as separate sessions
Ialso wanted to have the option to restore deleted files from the original card or cloud, in case I would delete some to make space.

Export a session to an external USB drive, for clients handoff

Never write to, erase, or format the original card

If you shoot photos or video and sometimes would prefer to work without a laptop,
I’d love for you to try it and tell me what you think:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fieldbox-backup/id6781406490

When I try to upload my photos from my iPhone to an app, like instagram or ebay, they will not load and just have a white circle in the middle like it is trying to download from somewhere. I do not have any photos on iCloud and backup is turned completely off. Any idea why they may not be uploading? (I even tried to upload an example to this question but can’t)

I downloaded some photos from google drive but they didjt show up in my photos library but did when i looked at my photos library in ibis paint???

Can someone help me delete these photos?

First photo is my library as shown in ibis paint, second photo is my library as shown in the photos app

This was something I didn’t fully appreciate until I started working on an iPhone photo backup app.

If Optimize iPhone Storage is enabled, you can scroll through years of photos in Apple Photos while some (if not All) of the full originals exist only in iCloud.

That becomes important when you decide:

“I want to plug in a USB drive and make my own offline copy.”

So I recently updated VaultDrive to handle this workflow directly.

Connect a compatible USB drive or SSD to your iPhone, select what you want to back up, and VaultDrive can:

✅ Copy photos/videos already stored locally on iPhone directly to USB

✅ Detect originals that need to be downloaded from iCloud

✅ Download those originals and then copy them to USB

✅ Let you choose Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + Cellular for iCloud downloads

✅ Preserve the original photo/video files and embedded metadata

✅ Keep useful source/folder organization instead of creating artificial date-based folders

✅ Resume backups while skipping files that were already copied

And you still don't need a Mac or PC.

For photos already stored locally on the iPhone, the transfer is directly from the phone to your USB drive—there's no VaultDrive cloud upload in between.

For iCloud-only originals, Apple obviously still needs an internet connection to download them first.

That distinction matters to me because the point of VaultDrive isn't to tell people to abandon iCloud.

It's to give you another option:

Keep Apple Photos/iCloud for convenience, but also have a physical copy of important memories on storage you control.

I built this because I wanted that workflow to be as simple as:

iPhone → USB drive → my Offline copy.

If anyone here has a large Apple Photos library, I'd be interested to know how much of it is actually stored locally versus optimized into iCloud.

VaultDrive on the App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vaultdrive-usb-backup/id6772883827

75% off Pro:

https://apps.apple.com/redeem/?ctx=offercodes&id=6772883827&code=WELCOME75

Pickex findet jedes Foto einer bestimmten Person in deiner Handykamera, damit du sie auf einmal löschen kannst.

Die Idee kam mir in einem ganz normalen Moment. Ich habe meine Handykamera nach einem Beleg durchsucht und bin auf ein Foto von meinem/meiner Ex gestoßen. Nicht eins, das ich extra behalten hatte – ein Gruppenfoto von einer Geburtstagsfeier, auf dem er/sie zufällig in der hinteren Reihe stand. Das ist es, wovor dich niemand warnt: Es sind nie die Fotos, die du behalten wolltest.

**So funktioniert's**

Du wählst ein bis vier Fotos einer Person aus. Die App scannt deine Bibliothek und zeigt dir alle anderen Fotos von dieser Person an, bereits ausgewählt. Du tippst einmal auf „Löschen“. Einzelne Fotos anzuschauen ist optional – der ganze Sinn ist, dass du sie nicht einzeln durchgehen musst.

**Technische Seite**

Alles läuft auf dem Gerät. Apples Vision-Framework für Gesichtserkennung und Embeddings, dann Clustering über diese Embeddings, um Übereinstimmungen zu gruppieren. Kein Backend, kein Konto, kein Foto verlässt jemals das Handy. Das war von Anfang an eine harte Einschränkung und hat ein paar Dinge echt schwierig gemacht:

\- **Große Bibliotheken:** Zehntausende von Fotos zu scannen, ohne den Akku zu leeren oder die Benutzeroberfläche zu blockieren, hat die meiste Optimierungszeit gekostet.

\- **Erinnerung vs. Genauigkeit:** Das war die eigentliche Designentscheidung. Wenn man mehr auf Erinnerung setzt, landen auch einige Fehlalarme im Ergebnis. Wenn man mehr auf Genauigkeit setzt, werden Fotos übersehen, und ein übersehenes Foto ist genau die Falle, die die App verhindern soll. Ich habe mich für die Erinnerung entschieden, alles vorausgewählt gelassen und das Abwählen auf einen einzigen Tipp reduziert. Das Löschen unter iOS läuft auch über „Kürzlich gelöscht“, sodass es zusätzlich ein 30-tägiges Sicherheitsnetz gibt.

\- **PHPhotoLibrary** hat mehr Randfälle bei Berechtigungen und Stapellöschungen, als ich erwartet hatte.

**Was ich anders machen würde**

Ehrlich gesagt, habe ich nie wirklich über Lizenzen nachgedacht, was mich fast zu einem fatalen Fehler gebracht hätte. Ich denke aber, dass das Design von Anfang an mit Claude (was leicht zu erkennen ist) für mich sehr lohnend war. Ich konnte die Pipeline und alle Funktionen einrichten und diese bei Apple einreichen. Nachdem jetzt alles akzeptiert ist, kann ich mich um das Aussehen kümmern, was die Pipeline und die kritischen Teile der App nicht beeinträchtigen wird, daher sollte ein Update dafür kein großes Problem sein.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pickex-delete-ex-photos/id6801488013

Ich beantworte gerne alles über die On-Device-Pipeline, den Clustering-Ansatz oder den App-Store-Prozess. Feedback ist willkommen, auch das harte.

TL;DR: Looking for photo editing and fast photo culling/sorting software for Mac. I run the organization but I also shoot events for a small volunteer-run non-profit, so free, discounted, donated, or reasonably priced one-time-license options are especially welcome. (Used ChatGPT to shorten this — English isn’t my first language.)

Hi,

I help run a small volunteer non-profit in Tartu, Estonia, focused on community building and reducing loneliness. I also handle most of our event photography.

I’m new to Mac (vision disability) and need a faster way to cull large shoots before editing: quickly compare similar images, rate/reject them, and narrow everything down.

What Mac apps would you recommend?

Ideally:

• fast and reliable;
• good on Apple Silicon;
• manual or ai;
• free, inexpensive, or discounted for non-profits;
• preferably a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.

I’m using a MacBook Pro M5. Our budget is small and volunteers use their own hardware, so cost matters.

If allowed by the mods, we’d also be open to a software donation from a developer. We can provide official non-profit documentation and annual reports if needed. Our Estonian business registry entry is here: https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/80653466/MTÜ-Teod?search_id=fb25e2f&pos=1

Any donated software would be transparently acknowledged on our upcoming website with the name of the software, link to developers website. We’re a small local organization in Estonia, so I don’t want to oversell the exposure.

What are you using? Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Jaak Timberg

I'm getting an iPhone after using handed down Android phones from my family, I've decided on getting the iPhone 15 Plus because it's the best option for my financials and meets the speca I want.. except for the 128GB Storage. I've been using a Huawei Y9 2019 Since 2019 and ive only used 44GB of 128GB, but from what I've heard, iPhone storage fill up pretty fast due to the apps being bloated, no clearing cache and things like photos taking larger storage and this is concerning because while I may not he using much storage at all at the moment, the reason I don't use much storage is because my camera etc is simply not good enough for me to even try and take photos, so when I do get an iPhone I'll definitely be taking pictures of my cat, of views, selfies and vireos way more often than I do now. I'm not into photography or content creation so I also won't be using the camera much. Opinions?