Burst Photo Storage Calculator

Why bursts become the biggest hidden pile in your camera roll

The stacking behaviour is the whole problem. iOS shows a burst as one thumbnail, so 30 full-size files read as a single photo when you scroll past. Nothing about the camera roll tells you that one square is 75 MB.

At ten frames a second, a casual habit piles up fast. Kids running, a dog catching something, a jumping shot at the beach, a goal at a Sunday match: hold the shutter for three seconds and you have 30 photos of one moment. An afternoon like that produces more data than a week of ordinary photography, and you only ever looked at one frame of it.

Bursts also slip past the usual cleanup routes. They do not turn up in "Large files" lists, because each frame on its own is a normal-sized photo. They are not screenshots and they are not video, so nothing flags them. They just sit in Media Types behind a thumbnail, holding gigabytes. It helps to size your whole library first with the Photo Storage Calculator, so the burst number has something to sit against.

How the burst storage maths works

Three multiplications and one subtraction:

• Bursts times frames per burst gives your total frame count.
• That count times the average frame size gives the total space.
• The frames you did not pick, times the same size, is the waste.
• What is left over is the keepers.

Take the default: 150 bursts at 12 frames each is 1,800 photos. At 2.5 MB a frame that is 4,500 MB, or 4.4 GB. Keep one shot from each burst and 1,650 frames are surplus, which is 4,125 MB or 4.0 GB, about 92% of the pile. Per burst, that is 27.5 MB you are storing for nothing.

Frames per burst is easy to estimate because iPhone Burst mode fires at a fixed ten frames per second for as long as you hold the shutter:

One caveat on frame size: iPhone writes burst frames as JPEG even when your camera is set to High Efficiency, because HEVC encoding cannot keep pace with 10 shots a second. So if your bursts came from the iPhone camera, the 12 MP JPEG preset (4 MB) is closer to reality than the HEIC one. Android varies by model, anywhere from about 3 to 30 frames per second, so count your own rather than assuming.

All conversions here use 1 GB = 1024 MB (binary). Apple and Google market storage in decimal GB, which is why your phone's own number can sit about 7% away from this one. The same convention runs through the Duplicate Photo Space Calculator and the Live Photos Storage Calculator, so the figures are comparable across all three.

Clearing bursts: Keep Only Favorites vs swiping

Apple's built-in route works. Open Photos, tap Albums, scroll to Media Types, tap Bursts, open a burst, tap Select, pick your keepers (the grey dots mark the frames iOS rates as sharpest), tap Done, then choose Keep Only Favorites. The unpicked frames move to Recently Deleted. Then open Recently Deleted and empty it, because until you do, the space has not actually come back.

Two problems with that route. It is one burst at a time, so 300 bursts means 300 rounds of the same six taps. And it ignores the near-identical shots that live outside a formal burst stack: the three taps in a row you fired at the same subject, which iOS never grouped as a burst but which waste exactly the same space.

Swipe44 handles both. Perceptual hashing runs on your phone and groups visually identical frames whether or not iOS ever marked them a burst, so the loose near-duplicates get caught alongside the official ones. You look at a group, swipe right on the keeper, swipe left on the rest, and everything you mark lands in a pending pile. One system confirmation clears the batch, then the app tells you how much space came back. No account, no uploads, and iCloud originals are never downloaded.

What clearing bursts is worth in iCloud+ and Google One

Cloud storage bills per tier, not per gigabyte, which is worth saying plainly: freeing 4 GB off a 200 GB plan saves you nothing at all. The money only shows up when the space you free carries you across a plan boundary. That is why the calculator above says "No tier change" instead of inventing a per-gigabyte figure.

Cross a boundary and it becomes real recurring money. Dropping from iCloud+ 200 GB to 50 GB takes you from $2.99 to $0.99 a month, which is $24 a year, every year. On Google One, moving from 200 GB to 100 GB is $29.99 down to $19.99 annually. Here are the current US tiers:

Apple does not sell an annual iCloud+ plan, only monthly, so any yearly iCloud figure on this page is a saving worked out as monthly times twelve, not a plan price you can buy. Google One does sell annual billing, and its yearly saving uses the annual prices directly. Google's free 15 GB is also shared across Drive, Gmail and Google Photos, so it fills faster than it looks.

To measure your whole library against the tiers rather than just the burst slice of it, use the iCloud Storage Cost Calculator. If the phone itself is what keeps running out of room, the iPhone Storage Size Calculator checks whether your library fits a 128, 256, or 512 GB device.