iCloud Cleanup | Andy Kong
Printed June 6, 2023
Hi there!
Not too long ago I acquired an electronic mail from Apple letting me know that my iCloud storage was full.
Type letter from Apple requesting I buy extra storage
Since the price of 200GB vs. 1TB jumps greater than threefold, I launched into an important exploration of alternate options. Since pictures made up the vast majority of my storage (~127GB), I figured I may simply go into my Images album and click on Kind By File Dimension.
…
Besides this isn’t a function supplied by Apple. It is not even a function within the iCloud browser. I suppose it is a bit too technical for Apple Images, and sadly it could additionally make it too simple to keep away from paying for extra iCloud storage.
Regardless of the cause, I nonetheless needed to undergo my pictures by file dimension. A number of apps exist for going by means of your pictures and highlighting duplicates, or into your movies and displaying you the file dimension. The one downside — pictures which have been offloaded to iCloud don’t present up in these apps, so they are not truly tremendous helpful. Additionally, would you actually need random apps to scan by means of all of your pictures?
Screenshot from a photograph file dimension viewing app, with non-downloaded pictures represented as 0B
Janky JS answer
As an alternative, I went to the iCloud web site and considered what was doable. I navigated to Images->Media Varieties->Movies, and zoomed out so far as I may.
Movies anonymized by sluggish web loading
We will see that every video has an accompanying length field — so long as it is an HTML factor, we will use JS to go looking and filter them. I discovered that each runtime field has the category video-text-badge. From there’s was a easy matter to search out all of them within the web page, type by their length, and spotlight those that have been previous some threshold. Here is the code:
As a result of iCloud solely masses the weather which can be on the web page, I’ve made this right into a operate that runs on a timer so new components get highlighted as they get scrolled into. Here is what it seems to be like:
Movies larger than 20s are surrounded by a purple field, making them a lot simple to select
To make use of it, simply open the Javascript console (proper click on web page -> Examine Ingredient) and paste in the complete gist. Now you’ll be able to simply choose a number of massive movies from iCloud and obtain them earlier than deleting, transferring them into longer-term storage: secret HDD below your mattress, different cloud storage, and so forth and so forth.
So, I used this script to take away all my iCloud movies >30s. The fascinating factor is, after I had eliminated all of the “massive movies” and downloaded them, it cleared ~55GB from my iCloud regardless of solely downloading 7GB of movies. Herein lies the thriller.
All downloaded movies take up 8GB of disk area
iCloud storage reduces from 199GB to 143GB after downloading 7GB of movies
Someway, these 7GB of video took up far more area within the cloud than on my arduous drive. Attention-grabbing…
I needed to check this additional. First, I uploaded a 4K video with a whole lot of movement. This took up 281 MB. My storage regarded like this after importing it:
4K video uploaded, iCloud says 145.33 GB used
Then I downloaded it and deleted it. The file was nonetheless 281 MB. Right here is the storage afterwards:
4K video deleted, iCloud says 145.6 GB used
Eradicating a 281MB video frees up ~270MB. This provides up, which is puzzling. What concerning the different, older movies?
I assumed that perhaps older movies may have a number of copies saved in iCloud, so I searched by means of my movies to see if I may discover a shorter one which takes up a whole lot of cupboard space. I discovered one with a whole lot of graphs, iCloud mentioned it took up 128 MB.
Older massive video that takes up 128 MB
Once I downloaded it, the file was solely 47 MB!
Downloaded video file is 47 MB
And right here is my iCloud storage earlier than and after
iCloud storage earlier than deleting the outdated video, 145.29 GB used
iCloud storage earlier than deleting the outdated video, 145.12 GB used, discount of 170MB
So iCloud says the video is 128MB, I obtain it and the video is definitely 48MB, and my free storage will increase by ~170MB after I deleted it. Attention-grabbing!
It is bizarre that my storage freed up greater than 7x the eliminated information dimension, and weirder nonetheless that outdated, massive movies seem to have a a lot bigger storage footprint in iCloud than in actual life.
I’m mildly excited about discovering out why this occurs, however I’m not /bored sufficient to do it myself. If one in every of you nice folks determine it out, please let me know by emailing me.
Anyway, I’ve freed up >50GB to fill with extra inane movies, and written a small script that enables me to do it once more sooner or later. Hope this proves useful to you, pricey reader.
Cya later!