Does she have an iPhone with the smallest amount of storage possible? Or hundreds of thousands of photos? Because I have about 15,000 photos on my iPhone and they only take up 5GB of space, which is like nothing. The optimize photos setting that only keeps a small thumbnail on the phone is a really excellent way of storage. When I first turned that on it freed up a ton of space.
So the absolute most frustrating piece software design, that to me sums up how the move from desktop to phone, changed us from being customers to the product. Is the fact an app can disable the screenshot feature on my Android phone (and I think iPhone). No application permission required. An executable I choose to run has ability to disable an operating system function, and I can do nothing about it. It’s so so frustrating.
Yes I want to take a screenshot of my banking app, it’s actually really important I’m allowed to take a screenshot of my banking app (when for example an unauthorized transaction appears)
I had exactly the opposite problem with my iPhone. I refuse to actually pay for an iCloud storage plan, so I eventually started getting messages that my phone can’t be backed up because my iCloud storage is full. My iCloud storage was full because it was backing up every random photo I ever took to the cloud, even ones I just took to text to someone, and don’t really care about backing up. And deleting them from the cloud also deletes them from your phone, so before I could delete them from the cloud I had to make sure the ones I really did want to save were also backed up to my PC.
My experience as well and I don’t have the latest and greatest iPhone with the mega GBs.
I’d suggest taking the IPhone to a Genius Bar and have apple geeks check her settings, etc.
If you don’t want to mess with the registry, just use Shift + right click to get the full context menu.
Not ‘the stupidest’, but two things I am experiencing this week filling out forms for a new employer:
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If a field (like phone or SSN) is collecting digits, but the numbers often use formatting in daily use, your field should accept variations. Or apply rules as the user is typing to add or strip the formatting in real time. You should not let me enter 123-456-7890 as my phone number, and then when I submit the form throw an error because I didn’t type 1234567890.
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I’m not sure where in the flow this issue is introduced, but when filling out forms like an I-9, if any fields are blank, I am required to fill them with N/A (maybe this is a process issue not a technical one?), and all dates must be filled out mm/dd/yyyy or the forms come back. If you fill out your date of hire as 3/4/2025, somewhere in the processing it’s rejected and comes back for you to fill out again.
Like, I need to manually write the leading zeroes. I’m assuming some digital processor can’t interpret m/d/yyyy. And it should. This is 2025. I’m not a developer, but it is trivial to transform m/d/yyyy into mm/dd/yyyy.
Both. Smallest iPhone and hundreds of pictures and videos a day, for years. She’s already gone to several stores and getting a bigger phone is the only way, it seems.
Optimize storage is the setting I’m referring to. Even the thumbnails are too big and numerous.
What kind of stores has she gone to? Phone stores?-of course they are going to try to sell her a bigger phone. Has she taken it to an Apple Genius Bar?
What model iPhone does she have? Are all the updates done? How many photos is she trying to store? For 99 cents to $2.99 a month you can get gobs more iCloud storage capacity.
She’s gone to Apple Stores, but I’m not sure if they have Genius Bars (she lives in a different country). We’ve spent many hours investigating this issue in their docs, forums, reddit, etc. and so far I’ve not been able to find a solution.
She has an iPhone 14 128 GB.
It’s got nothing to do with iCloud storage: She has more than enough space there (several TB). The problem is that iCloud photo sync causes the phone to also download the thumbnail versions of her photos, of which she has far too many. There is no way to either disable the thumbnail downloads, or delete photos from the phone without also deleting them from iCloud.
I think you can selectively disable iCloud photo sync without disabling the rest of iCloud: How to turn off iCloud Photos - Apple Support
Hundreds of pictures and videos a day would be huge. I think my wife is a picture nut, but she’s only taking 0-10 pictures a day unless she’s traveling, but even then she’d delete 90% of the pictures each day.
What you’re describing is someone who is practically documenting her life in photo and video. Probably not the use case the iPhone was designed for.
Absolutely. Especially as she gets older. She carries chargers and backup batteries around with her all day just so she can take more pictures. She takes more pictures in a week than I do in a year…
She’s always asking why we don’t send her more photos, lol, and my only answer… “Mom, it’s not normal to take this many pictures… I don’t think any Apple designer or engineer has your kind of brain…”. Normal people don’t do this.
I’m sure that’s not, and that’s fine. But it would be nice if they provided a simple option to get around it: either allow the user to delete photos from their phone without also deleting them from iCloud, or allow the user to simply choose not to download thumbnails. There, problem solved.
This isn’t an issue on Android, by the way, even though it’s also not “designed” to be a 24/7/365 life recorder. It’s just a different (and I’d argue more elegant) approach to the problem of software sync.
Oh well, her problem. I offered to get her a Pixel and help her transfer all her photos over to Google Photos, but she doesn’t want to do that. Well, I guess Apple’s strategy won, lol… she’s just going to upgrade to the latest iPhone whatever number Pro Ultra Max Big Boy instead. That should buy her a few more years, hopefully.
Can she install Google Photos on her iPhone and back them up that way, disabling the iCloud backup?
I did mention that to her as a possibility, but I forget exactly why she said she doesn’t want to do that (this was a few months ago, when she was visiting).
IIRC, from our research, we determined that could be a viable workaround that would solve the problem, but there was some other unrelated reason she didn’t want to do that… sorry, I forget the details at this point.
At her age, in retirement, I’m not going to argue with her about how she chooses to spend money on tech. She’s made the decision that spending money on a new iPhone, in the size (and color!) she wants, will make her happier than figuring out a technical workaround to the Apple design choice. More power to her, I guess… I’m annoyed at Apple, but she obviously isn’t. She’s more annoyed at ME for getting her the smaller iPhone…
Someone who takes as many photos as her ought to consider the iPhone with a full terabyte of storage.
BTW, she could connect the phone to a PC and perform local backups.
Oh yes, she knows 
She was annoyed they don’t offer 2 TB or 5 TB versions.
I don’t think that would remove the thumbnails from her phone, would it? Her PC already gets them from iCloud sync. Not that she needs any more copies of the photos… I could probably start a museum just from the ones from this month’s text messages…
She could also sign into iCloud on her computer and download them to a backup hard drive, then delete a ton from the phone.
I can’t imagine if she is taking hundreds of photos a day she is ever going to actually look at more than a tiny fraction of them.
I DESPISE on my modern Windows desktop when I search for a file in my computer it now immediately searchs the Internet and I have to jump through hoops just to look through my own computer.
Yes WorkFile.PDF I REALLY need to find on Bing
This is one of the reasons I use FileLocator Pro (there’s an option to install the free version).
I hated on Apple last week. This week, it’s an Android thing: In the Gmail app, there is still no way to create a new label. Or delete an existing one. You can assign an existing label to a message, but not make a new one.
You still need a computer (or maybe the mobile site? dunno) to do this most basic of tasks. Sigh.