Popular Science recently posted an article “Your smartphone photos take up too much space. Here's how to downsize them."
Firstly, don't do it. The solution the author provides is defeatist. Photos never take up too much room because, as a general rule, the more data you have the better your photo will look. For example, 14-bit RAW files from a professional camera have insane amount of detail and information. One has so much flexibility and data to work with that editing becomes very powerful.
I’m not suggesting one shoots RAW on iPhone, while that can be done, those images require a lot of post-processing to make them look great. It requires too much time for the “snapshot” type of photography most people are doing with their mobile device. This isn’t to downplay the value of JPEG images. JPEG formats are very powerful and functional because they can give a very nice image the quality yet size you need. Don’t sacrifice that data, though. JPEGs are lossy—you loose quality and detail so compressing or downsizing them further only does damage.
The author goes on to suggest that “it is all about balancing compression with quality.” Yes, this is true and that is why JPEG images exist and, more importantly, HEIC (High Efficiency Image Coding) that is supported by most modern operating systems and photo applications and the default for iPhone and iPad photographs.
Second, the premise is faulty. The images take up “too much space” is based on the assumption your device does not have the storage you need. That could be true. For someone who takes many photos, I would never recommend a 64GB storage option on a mobile device. 256GB is ideal, 512GB is even better—especially if you shoot lots of video. In the future, I would recommend getting more storage. The old rule of thumbs is, if you think you need X amount of storage today, double it because you’ll need it tomorrow. And, on mobile devices, many do not allow for one to expand storage after the fact.
However, still DO NOT resize you images for the sake of saving storage. Storage is meant to be used. To be clear, one should not use ALL of the storage on your device. Having a completely full iPhone, for example, it will cause other problems. Operating systems need some free space to do some tasks. And, should your storage be full, one can’t take more photos.
A much more sensible and economical method would be to expand one’s cloud storage. For example, iOS has an option to optimize storage concerning photos. Previews of the images are stored locally on the device while the original quality, be it RAW, JPEG, TIFF, etc., are stored in iCloud. It is seamless and only happens over WiFi and while connected to power so it will not use a mobile data plan or impact battery life.
To add 50GB to one’s iCloud storage, it is a dollar a month. One US dollar for storage of thousands of images. For three dollars, 200GB, and shell out a measly ten dollars adds two terabytes (2000GB) of storage. iCloud connects to all Apple devices and so, as one gets new or more devices, photos will be there—turn on a new iPhone/iPad/Mac, log into iCloud, and one’s photo library appears (be patient as the first sync takes some time).
Three, the process the author suggest one takes to resize your images is a real undertaking—too much effort for little return. It involves third party apps, importing photos, resizing, deleting, etc. Take a 100 photos on a vacation and you’ll spend half your trip resizing your images
And four, Live Photos, found on iOS/iPadOS/macOS devices, have additional content, video specifically, and using an application to downsize will likely remove the Live Photo content. Should you want to disable that, especially when sharing the image, it can be disabled (but preserved) if one edits the Live Photos on an Apple device.
There is so much to be said about storage on your devices, sharing them with friends, and more, but to spend all this time and effort to make your images small, then delete the originals, and later regret the quality you’ve lost, just don’t do it. This is bad advice.
I have hundreds of gigabytes and shot hundreds of thousands of photos and, using iCloud and Optimize Storage active, my entire photo library only utilizes 3.51GB of storage on my iPhone 11 Pro (256GB).
While storage and backups are one of the hardest parts of photography, the suggestion one should sacrifice quality and time to save a space and data is the wrong play. Get iCloud storage, buy an external hard drive, and keep up on deleting photos that aren’t worth keeping, but don’t spend time diminishing the quality of your images.
Storage Recommendations:
iCloud Storage (50GB, 200GB, 2TB options)
Lacie Rugged Hard Drives
G-Drive Mobile
Google Drive (though not a personal recommendation)