Photo Storage Calculator

What actually decides how much space a photo takes

Three things, really. How many megapixels the sensor wrote, what format it wrote them in (HEIC, JPEG, PNG or ProRAW), and how hard the encoder squeezed. Nothing else moves the number much.

Megapixels behave almost linearly. Double them and you roughly double the bytes, which is why a 48 MP photo is about four times a 12 MP one in the same format. Format is the bigger step: JPEG is about twice HEIC for the same picture, and ProRAW is about ten times it. Here is the grid this calculator works from:

Sanity check: a 12 MP 8-bit frame is 36 MB with no compression at all, so HEIC at 2.5 MB is working at roughly 14:1 and JPEG at 5 MB at roughly 7:1. Both are normal for a quality-90 encode.

It is also why every number on this page is an estimate. Compression works on detail, so a 12 MP HEIC of a blank wall and a 12 MP HEIC of a forest are nowhere near the same size. Treat the total as a figure with about 20% of give in either direction.

Photos vs video: where the gigabytes really go

People count their photos and blame the count. The video is usually the problem. One hour of 4K at 60 fps is about 24 GB, which outweighs roughly 9,600 HEIC photos on its own.

Those are Apple's own in-camera estimates, and they assume HEVC. Set the phone to Most Compatible and it records H.264 instead, which needs roughly 40% more space for the same clip. Worth checking two settings: Settings, then Camera, then Record Video, and Settings, then Camera, then Formats, where High Efficiency keeps stills in HEIC.

Live Photos are the quieter offender. Each one bundles the still with about three seconds of HEVC, so it costs roughly double. On a 12,000-shot library with Live Photos always on, that is an extra 27 GB you never decided to spend.

How long will your free space last?

A total is a snapshot. The useful question is when you run out. Shoot 150 photos a month with Live Photos on, add ten minutes of 4K, and you are putting on roughly 2 GB a month. If you have 15 GB of headroom, that headroom is gone by next spring.

So: buy more storage, push it to the cloud, or delete. The cloud is the option that looks free and is not. iCloud's Optimize iPhone Storage moves full-resolution originals off the phone, but the library keeps growing and so does the bill. If you want the money side of that, the iCloud Storage Cost Calculator turns gigabytes into a monthly figure.

One note on units. This page uses decimal gigabytes (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes), the same way Apple and Google report storage. Your phone's own storage screen counts in binary, which is why a "128 GB" iPhone reads as about 119 GB.

Getting the space back

The dead weight in a camera roll is always the same stuff. Burst frames where you kept all eleven. Duplicates that came back from sharing and re-saving. Screenshots of things you dealt with months ago. Videos you shot once and never opened again. Hardly any of it is worth keeping, and all of it takes up room.

That is the job Swipe44 does. You work through the camera roll by swiping, right to keep and left to delete, from Recents, Random, or one month at a time. Duplicates get grouped by on-device perceptual hashing so you can review them side by side. Everything you mark collects in a pending pile, then 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.

There are more sizing tools on the tools page, and the blog takes on the storage questions a calculator cannot answer.