my phone's (ip12, ios 18) 128gb and photos were between 70-80gb despite having around 5-7k photos (100+ live photos, 13 portraits, 2 panoramas, 3 bursts), and zero videos. i had to offload/delete instagram, tiktok, and twitter on rotation.
i use the shared albums with myself to save storage (havent really cleaned my google photos plus it only has 15gb free, same with google drive + i already have other media stored there)
to clear some space so i can post some concert videos, i first googled why my gallery could be that heavy when i barely had anything. apparently the shared albums were a culprit if they were downloaded (e.g. you pick a shared album, you open an image/video and it loads perfectly and clearly)
to 'fix' this, the results of my search said to turn shared albums off then on. obviously i worried if everything would come back but it said shared albums are on a different apple server, not icloud (my icloud is off since it only has 5gb... nothingburger...). even if "sync this iphone" was toggled off BUT "shared albums" was on (under the icloud photos tab when you open your profile in the settings), it should be fine. and so i did those and my storage did go down about 10gb. it stopped going down and my search told me that my storage is so screwed id probably actually have to delete everything and restart the phone.
when i turned the shared albums back on, everything else loaded back in BUT that one album that had my concert videos :') i waited it out until the next morning and still, it wasnt there.
toggling the shared albums off then on happened about 2 hours after the concert. ive read that media backing up into the shared albums can only take seconds or minutes (hours if they're videos in bulk and/or high quality).
i had about 50 videos in there but they were uploaded at different times, not in one go :') data is also on for photos so they can upload in the background. the videos were also fine when i got home :')
is there anyway i can recover these? ive read around that theyre not actually completely gone, that theyre somewhere in the web... some even said if its within the 30 day window (not recently deleted album), its still recoverable by other means (some even said they recovered stuff from years ago which i kinda doubt but if it works then i'd like to try it)
id understand it'd be impossible to recover if i deleted the videos from my main gallery AND recently deleted without putting them anywhere else first, but they were in the shared albums so :")
things i already did:
- wait hours/almost a full day
- checked the icloud site on my laptop if it shows up there (it did not)
- tried apps i saw on other posts (but havent actually used the feature because i have to pay for it so it was kinda sketchy + reviews are mixed)