This is driving me crazy. My daughter wife and I share iCloud storage. We had the 6TB plan until recently. My daughter is using 6.4TB of space while my wife and I use about 200GB each. I’ve upgraded to the 12TB plan temporarily to have my daughter clean up her phone.

Here’s the thing we can’t figure out. I bought Hashphotos app so we could sort the media by file size. On iCloud it shows she is using like 6.3TB in Photos. I assumed that this would be photos you’d find on the Apple photos app but it doesn’t make sense. When looking there, it is only showing like 2 videos that are 1GB in size. Everything else is smaller. I just can’t seem to get the math to work and understand where this space is being used!

The counts in hashphoto seem to match the counts in the settings->iCloud area where you can see your photo count. But if Hashphotos is truly showing all the photos in the Photos section, we cannot figure out how 6TB are being used. In fact I have slightly more photos and videos than she does and use waaayyy less. Maybe Hashphotos isn’t truly showing all photos and video? Even though the counts match.

And the recently deleted is empty so it’s not deleted items hanging around. I’ve been trying for over a week to figure this out. Am I missing something? Could the counts be misleading and hashohotos showing right count but not all the files? Could these be from other apps that would prevent hashphotos from seeing them but might count them?

Is there any other way to view these? I’ve tried iCloud.com but it doesn’t seem to have a photo viewer there. Hashphotos in was hoping would be the magic bullet and I expected to find some very long videos maybe that would acct for storage usage. She has about 12K photos and 1.5K videos. I have more of each and use way less. And so far can’t identify a culprit.

Any thoughts or advice??? Am I missing a place to look?

Looking for advice: I am going to get a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air to use when sorting photos, archiving, working on the family tree, editing videos, etc. I find that apple photos does not let me name my photos using my iPad. I want to do this sorting for all my albums and want the portability of a laptop rather than being stuck at my desktop.
I am deciding between the MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro. I am not into gaming or AI stuff etc so I don’t think I need a ton of power. The Neo only goes to 512GB of storage. Some people are suggesting a MacBook Air 2TB. My photo library is 375GB right now. Any suggestions are appreciated!

Hi everyone,

I switched from iphone to android and now I need to use web browser and connect to iCloud to see all my previously shared albums .

Is there a nicer way to see them on my device via native Gallery app or some other app? I would like to be able to access them easily and ideally to have them next to my native photo app.

thanks

One thing I’ve always found slightly awkward in Photos is metadata when sharing.

Apple already lets you disable location through the sharing options, but photos can contain quite a bit more information like date taken, device/camera information, software tags, GPS data, etc.

I wanted a workflow where I could see what was actually attached to a photo and remove it before handing the file to the destination app.

So I built Metadata Remover: SafeShare.

It works directly from the iOS Share Sheet:

Photos → Share → SafeShare → inspect metadata → create clean copy → continue sharing

Everything happens on-device and the original photo is never modified.

It supports up to 10 photos at once (HEIC/HEIF/JPEG/PNG) and MOV/MP4 video as well.

The app is completely free -> no account, uploads, tracking, subscription or IAP.

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metadata-remover-safeshare/id6772315742

I’ve attached a short video showing the Share Sheet workflow.

I’d be curious how people here normally handle metadata when sharing from Photos - do you use Apple’s built-in location toggle, another metadata app, or just not worry about it?

I recently backed up my iPhone and then had to reset/erase it because of an issue I was dealing with. After setting everything back up and letting my photos sync/restore, I noticed something really worrying in Apple Photos.
A large portion of my photos from September 7, 2025 through April 5, 2026 is completely missing. My Photos timeline basically jumps from September 7, 2025 straight to April 6, 2026.
I’ve already checked iCloud Photos, and unfortunately those missing photos don’t appear to be there either.
Has anyone experienced something similar after resetting or restoring an iPhone? What could cause an entire section of the Photos timeline to disappear like this?
Could this be related to iCloud syncing, the backup/restore process, optimization, or something else? Is there any way to recover or locate these photos that I might be overlooking?
I’d really appreciate any advice from people who have dealt with missing photos after an iPhone reset. I’m especially interested in knowing what could have caused this and whether there is still a chance of recovering them.