How Many Photos Per GB Calculator

How the photos-per-GB maths works

It is two steps. First work out what one photo weighs: megapixels times a per-format coefficient times a compression factor. Then divide your storage by that. Nothing else is involved, which is why the answer swings so hard on the format you picked.

The coefficients this page uses, in megabytes per megapixel:

Worked example at the defaults: 12 MP times 0.208 gives 2.496 MB per photo, and 128,000 MB divided by 2.496 is 51,282 photos. Counts always round down, since a photo that only partly fits does not fit at all.

One number to ignore: pixels times bit depth. A 12 MP frame at 8-bit RGB is 36 MB of sensor data, and some calculators divide your storage by that. No camera writes an uncompressed frame to disk, so the count that comes out is roughly fourteen times too pessimistic for HEIC. Always divide by the encoded size.

On units, no guessing required: 1 GB is 1000 MB here and 1 TB is 1000 GB, the decimal counting Apple, Google and every card maker use on the box. Calculators that quietly use 1024 MB per GB return counts about 2.4% higher than these.

Photos per GB by format, from HEIC to ProRAW

Take a single gigabyte and a standard 12 MP camera. It holds about 400 HEIC photos, 199 JPEGs, 83 PNGs, 75 camera RAW files, or 40 ProRAW files. That is a ten-to-one spread from top to bottom, off the same sensor and the same photograph.

The ranking follows how hard each format works. HEIC uses HEVC intra-frame coding and gets about the same picture into half the bytes JPEG needs. PNG is lossless, which is fine for flat graphics and expensive for photographic detail, and it is what iOS writes for every screenshot. That is why a screenshot-heavy library balloons out of proportion to its photo count. RAW and ProRAW keep sensor data your eye will never see, in exchange for editing latitude.

The headline is that format beats resolution. A 12 MP ProRAW file (25 MB) is larger than a 48 MP HEIC (10 MB). If your storage is disappearing, check what the camera is saving before you touch the resolution setting. The Photo File Size Calculator runs this same model in the forward direction, megapixels to megabytes.

Why your device holds fewer photos than the number above

Three deductions sit between the box figure and your camera roll, and they come off in order.

Advertised versus formatted capacity. A 128 GB card or phone exposes about 119 GB once the file system has taken its share, roughly 93% of the label. Tick the advertised-capacity box above and every count on this page drops by that factor. The SD Card Storage Calculator applies the same 0.93 to card capacities.

The operating system and apps. On a phone, iOS or Android plus your installed apps can claim 15 to 30 GB before a single photo is stored. On a 128 GB iPhone that is a quarter of the device gone. The iPhone Storage Size Calculator works out which tier to buy once photos are only one claim on the space.

Video. One minute of 4K at 30 fps costs about 170 MB, which is 68 twelve megapixel HEICs gone in sixty seconds. Ten minutes of 4K is worth more than 680 photos. Video is almost always the thing that filled the phone, not the camera roll count.

The cheapest way to get more photos per GB

Best value first. Switch to HEIC (Settings, then Camera, then Formats, then High Efficiency) and the whole library halves at a stroke. Leave a Pro camera at 12 or 24 MP rather than 48 MP Max unless you genuinely intend to crop hard or print big. Both are free, both are one-time settings changes.

Then there is the one that frees the most space: delete what you are keeping for no reason. Roughly 22% of a typical camera roll is duplicates or poor quality frames. Near identical burst shots, screenshots of things you dealt with months ago, four photos of the same coffee. No camera setting recovers that space.

That is what Swipe44 is for. You go through the roll by swiping, right to keep and left to delete, working from Recents, from Random, or one month at a time so you are never staring down 40,000 photos at once. Duplicates get grouped by on-device perceptual hashing, ready to review together. Everything you mark collects in a pending pile and goes in one batch behind a single system confirmation, with a tally of the space you got back. Nothing is uploaded, no account is needed, and iCloud originals are never downloaded.

To size the problem before you start, the Duplicate Photo Space Calculator estimates how many of your gigabytes are copies, and the Photo Storage Calculator runs the reverse of this page, turning a photo count into a total in GB. If the 5 GB free tier is what you are trying to squeeze into, the iCloud Free 5GB Storage Calculator answers that version of the question.