How to Free Up iPhone iCloud Storage: Backup Videos & Photos

The iCloud Storage Challenge

• 💡 Apple's iCloud storage can become a "chokehold," leading users to pay for increasing storage tiers.
• 🎯 The speaker, Bridget Carey, shares practical methods for backing up iPhone photos and videos to free up space, moving beyond Apple's official tutorials.
• ⚠️ Blame is placed on Apple for creating phones with advanced camera technology, encouraging users to capture everything in high quality, leading to massive file sizes.

Methods for Backing Up iCloud Photos & Videos

• 💻 Using a computer and icloud.com allows downloading files in batches, with a maximum selection of 1,000 items at a time.
• ⏳ Downloading 688 files (about 8GB) took approximately 10 minutes, with the downloaded files saved as a zip file.
• 📌 While the metadata (original date) is preserved, the zip file organization is not ideal, listing files with the current date.
• 💾 Connecting a backup storage drive directly to an iPhone is presented as a more efficient method.
• ⚡ This direct connection allows the iPhone to identify and prioritize the largest video files for deletion.

Managing Large Files and Storage Settings

• 🔍 Users can navigate to Settings > Account > iCloud > Storage to review photos and videos, identifying large files and unnecessary items like screenshots.
• ⚠️ Transferring multiple videos at once via the iPhone can lead to error messages, and the phone must not go to sleep to avoid restarting the process.
• ✅ After verifying that photos and videos are successfully backed up to an external drive, they can be deleted from iCloud, with a 30-day grace period in the "Recently Deleted" folder.

Apple One Subscription and Future Habits

• 💰 The Apple One subscription is recommended for those already paying for storage, as it includes 2TB of iCloud Plus and other Apple services.
• 💭 The emotional attachment to photos and videos as a "time machine" makes deleting them difficult, but changing habits is necessary.
• 🌱 Future habits should include more frequent clearing of unwanted files and potentially recording less massive 4K video, accepting that not every memory needs to be instantly accessible in one's pocket.