Travel Photo Storage Calculator
Tell it how long you are away, how much you shoot in a day and how much room your phone has left. Back comes a per-day burn rate, the day your storage runs out, and the amount to clear before you fly. It also prices the 4K to 1080p swap across the whole trip, which is usually the biggest lever you have.
Travel Photo Storage Calculator
The trip
Settings, General, iPhone Storage, or Settings, Storage on Android, shows this as Available.
How much you shoot
Sets both numbers below. Change either one by hand and the chips let go.
A normal sightseeing day is 40 to 80 shots. A wedding or a safari day can be 300 or more.
Count the clips, not the day. Five one-minute clips is five minutes.
Camera settings
HEIC has been the default on every iPhone since iOS 11 and on most modern Android phones. JPEG is roughly double for the same picture.
Apple's own in-device estimates, from Settings, Camera, Record Video.
85% of your trip is video, 15% is photos.
Clear before you leave
Nothing, you are good to go
Your free space already covers the trip. Headroom never hurts, but you do not have to make room.
That is 55% of the trip total, saved by one setting in Settings, Camera, Record Video.
Make room before you fly
Swipe44 clears the camera roll by swiping: right to keep, left to delete, working through Recents, Random or one month at a time. Duplicates get hashed on your phone and grouped for review. Everything you mark goes in one batch behind a single delete confirmation, and the app tells you how many gigabytes came back.
The same trip at every video setting
| Video setting | MB per minute | Trip total | Vs. your pick |
|---|
Photo count, format and trip length held constant. Only the video setting changes. Decimal gigabytes throughout: 1 GB = 1,000 MB, the way phone Settings screens count.
Video is the whole calculation
Photos and video are not in the same league, so any trip-storage guess that averages them comes out wrong. At the figures this calculator uses, one minute of 4K at 30 fps costs 170 MB, the same as 68 standard HEIC photos. One minute of 4K at 60 fps costs 400 MB, or 160 photos. Take 40 photos a day and shoot one minute of 4K/60, and the video is already eighty per cent of your trip.
| Setting | Per minute | Per hour | Same as |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4K, 60 fps | 400 MB | 24 GB | 160 HEIC photos a minute |
| 4K, 30 fps (the default) | 170 MB | 10.2 GB | 68 HEIC photos a minute |
| 1080p HD, 60 fps | 90 MB | 5.4 GB | 36 HEIC photos a minute |
| 1080p HD, 30 fps | 60 MB | 3.6 GB | 24 HEIC photos a minute |
Those are Apple's own in-device estimates, the ones printed under each option in Settings, Camera, Record Video, recorded in High Efficiency (HEVC). Next to them, photos are close to background noise. The exception is ProRAW, where a single 48 MP file is 100 MB and the maths flips the other way round. For the full grid of resolutions, frame rates and codecs, slo-mo and ProRes included, use the video storage calculator.
What a week away actually costs
Four shooting habits, seven days, 12 MP HEIC photos, once at the 4K/30 default and once at 1080p/30. Find yourself in the left column and read across.
| Shooter | Per day | 7 days at 4K/30 | 7 days at 1080p/30 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light | 20 photos, 1 min video | 1.5 GB | 0.8 GB |
| Typical | 60 photos, 5 min video | 7.0 GB | 3.2 GB |
| Heavy | 150 photos, 15 min video | 20.5 GB | 8.9 GB |
| Video-first | 80 photos, 40 min video | 49 GB | 18 GB |
One setting halves or thirds every row. That is what the comparison table above the calculator is for: the resolution decision is worth more gigabytes than any amount of restraint about how many pictures you take. If you want the whole-library version of this arithmetic rather than the per-trip one, the photo storage calculator sizes everything already on the phone.
How much to clear before you leave
Clear the trip total plus a buffer. Twenty per cent is a sane margin, because nobody shoots exactly to plan and the phone still wants room for an iOS update, offline maps and the shows you download for the flight. A 7 GB trip means clearing about 8.4 GB, not 7.
The gigabytes are almost always sitting in the same few places: old videos you have never rewatched, duplicates, burst frames, screenshots of things you sorted out months ago, and last year's trip that is already backed up somewhere. That last one is usually the biggest pile and the easiest to part with, since you picked your favourites from it long ago.
This is where Swipe44 earns its keep. Open the monthly deck for last year's trip, swipe right to keep and left to delete, then run the duplicate scan, which uses on-device hashing to group the near-identical shots. Everything you marked collects in one pile and goes in a single batch behind one system confirmation, and the app reports how much space came back. Nothing is uploaded, and iCloud originals are never downloaded. For a sense of how much a full pass would free up, run the camera roll cleanup estimator first.
If you run out anyway
Drop to 1080p for the rest of the trip. The calculator prices that swap exactly, and on a phone screen you will not see the difference. Then delete the largest videos first: one minute of 4K/60 buys back as much room as 160 photos. Screen recordings and old downloads come after that.
Two things people get wrong on the road. First, deleting on the phone frees nothing until you empty Recently Deleted, where everything sits for thirty days by default. Second, cloud upload is not a plan while travelling, because Optimise iPhone Storage only reclaims space once the upload finishes, and patchy hotel wifi or metered roaming rarely lets that happen. If the honest answer is that the phone was always going to be too small, the iPhone storage size calculator shows what each capacity really leaves you after iOS takes its share.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about travel photo storage calculator
How much storage do I need for a week's holiday?
About 7 GB for a typical week: 60 photos and 5 minutes of 4K at 30 fps a day, shot in iPhone-default HEIC. That figure hides an enormous spread. A light shooter on 1080p/30 (20 photos and 1 minute of video a day) gets through the whole week on about 0.8 GB. A video-first shooter at 4K/60 (80 photos and 40 minutes a day) needs about 113 GB. Nothing else you can change moves the answer that far.
How many photos fit in 1 GB?
About 400 at 12 MP HEIC (2.5 MB each), about 200 as JPEG (5 MB), about 100 at 48 MP HEIC Max (10 MB), and about 10 in 48 MP Apple ProRAW (100 MB). The photo file size calculator breaks those figures down by megapixel and format.
Should I shoot 4K or 1080p on holiday?
1080p at 30 fps costs 60 MB a minute. 4K/30 costs 170 MB and 4K/60 costs 400 MB, so 1080p runs about a third of 4K/30 and a seventh of 4K/60. On a phone screen, and for anything headed to Instagram, the difference is close to invisible. The switch lives in Settings, Camera, Record Video, and the video storage calculator prices every resolution and frame rate.
Is 128 GB enough for a two-week trip?
For the trip itself, almost always yes. The real question is what is already on the phone. A 128 GB device gives up roughly 20 to 28 GB to iOS, System Data and preinstalled apps before you take a single photo, so what matters is your free space today, not the number on the box. The iPhone storage size calculator shows what each capacity actually leaves you.
What do I do if I run out of space mid-trip?
Work in order of payoff. Big videos first, because one minute of 4K/60 is 400 MB. Then screen recordings, then the six near-identical shots of the same cathedral. Emptying Recently Deleted is the step people forget, and until you do it none of that space has actually come back.
Does iCloud Photos free up space on my phone while I travel?
Only if Optimise iPhone Storage is switched on, and only after the upload has actually finished, which takes a connection good enough to get it done. Patchy hotel wifi or a metered roaming plan will not rescue you. Clear the space before you go rather than counting on clearing it on the road.
Do Live Photos, bursts and screenshots change these numbers?
Yes, and always upward. A Live Photo carries a three-second clip on top of the still, so it runs roughly double a plain HEIC. A burst writes ten frames a second. If you shoot either, add 30 to 50% to the photo half of the total, or just budget for the next photo format up. To see what that adds up to across a whole library, try the camera roll cleanup estimator.