Originally Posted by
Ledsteplin So for no reason, iCloud starts downloading photos to your phone? Not sure I understand. The photos on your phone should be the same as in iCloud Photo Library.
They are the same. But when "optimize storage" is enabled within the Photos app settings, all you're seeing on your phone is thumbnails of most of them. When you select the ones that are NOT on your phone, it actually opens up a blurry version and takes a second to re-download the full version. So when my photo storage is "optimized", a majority of my photos/videos act like that - the thumbnails are synced up with the iCloud Photo Library, but the full photo is not actually on the phone.
So up until about a week ago, my photos and videos only took up about 1.5gb of space on my phone, because all but the most recent were essentially just thumbnails synced to my iCloud photo library. Then suddenly in the past week, the system decided it needed to have all the originals downloaded to the phone, instead of just having their thumbnails as holding spots, and now they take up over 13gb of space.
Does that make sense or am I just muddying things up?
