Have you seen this on your 16GB iPhone?

Have you suffered the pain of deleting pictures / videos / apps just to make sure your iPhone has enough space for your next picture? Gone are those days!

Here is how.

On your iPhone, go to Settings -> iCloud -> Photos. Check iCloud Photo Library. Also make sure to check “Optimize iPhone Storage”.

If at this point you have enough iCloud storage for all your pictures, then you are all set. But if you are like me who has reached the storage issue and if you have free iCloud storage tier (5GB default), then you probably don’t have enough storage in your iCloud account to store all your images. This is the time when you pay that 1$ to Apple to give you 20GB of storage on iCloud. Yes I know I did not mention paying Apple, but bear with me for a moment. Think about all the pain you have to go through to delete all those videos and apps. Also you paid 100$ less than 64GB iPhone so paying 1$/month does not sound that bad anymore.

If you are still with me, leave your iPhone at peace for sometime and get back to it in a few hours (while iPhone does its magic with iCloud) to see this under Settings -> General -> Usage

Yes, 3GB of available storage! And yes if you keep taking pictures, iPhone will do its magic to manage this storage for you to make sure you have enough storage hopefully till you get your new 64GB iPhone 7.

Under the hood, Photos app will store the thumbnail of your old pictures instead of the full resolution pictures and store the full resolution pictures on iCloud. If you happen to browse through old pictures then it will pull the full resolution images on demand. Not a bad price to pay for being able to take more pictures is it?