Photos app using excessive storage and System Data inflating on iPhone

cerulite wrote: … it’s not optimising my storage.

But you have indicated that your phone is indeed optimizing your Photos. Your Photos Library on your phone uses only 23% of the space that it takes at iCloud. One thing you can do is to give the phone better synchronization opportunities.

Keep in mind that iCloud is designed primarily for mobile devices, and since syncing uses the battery, and since lots of people are very anxious about battery drain, the iPhone will avoid syncing when not plugged in. And since syncing uses processing power, and people hate slow-downs, the iPhone will avoid syncing while you are using it. And since syncing requires bandwidth, the iPhone will avoid syncing when the internet connection is weak.

So, if you want faster syncing, then find good wifi, plug the phone in, set the lock screen, and leave it alone.

The optimized versions are needing storage on your iPhone - you need at least storage for the thumbnails and the structure of the library, for example the albums and the folders, the recognized objects and people. With "optimize Storage" you will get temporarily rid of the high resolution originals and depth maps of portrait photos, the video components of Live Photos. I would not expect the "optimize" feature to shrink your library to less than 10% of its size in iCloud. If the iPhone is forced to optimize the library dramatically, it will be painful to work with your Photos. You will be seeing plenty of black or white thumbnails, and the Photos.app will become slow as molasses. You'd better not let your iCloud Photos Library grow larger than it is already.

You told us the number of items in iCloud Photos, but not the size your library is having in iCloud. Are your videos very large? Or just small video clips? the previews of large videos may need more storage locally than the previews of photos.

You're getting close to filling up your phone, so be careful. Many operations use the iPhone's empty storage space to move files around. If you run out of storage, then those operations may not be able to be completed and, ironically, that can mean that even deleting doesn't work. If you have less than 10% available, then things can get lost forever. This is also true if your iCloud storage space gets low.

Optimize will keep data on your phone if you're using it a lot. If you are editing or printing pictures, or if you need to zoom in on them then the phone needs to keep that data in local storage. Once data is there on the phone, it will be kept for a while in case it's needed. If storage gets tight, it will dump the extra data if it can. You don't have (or need) much control over that. All of this will be different on different devices--it's hard to compare one Photos Library to another.

If the pictures aren't being used very much, then you can expect the phone to use as little as 10% of the space that a full Library would use. You're at 23% That's not too bad.

so is there anything i can do? as i’ve mentioned, my mom has way more photos and uses less storage on her phone, and i’d say she views and edits her photos more often that i do. so i don’t exactly know why it’s not optimising my storage. additionally, i feel like the system data keeps inflating over and over again.