Photos driving me CRAZY

[lastayt]

I have a 32G iPad mini and a 64G IPhone SE. All my settings surrounding pictures are identical. The number of pics and videos are identical on each. My cloud contains 9.3G of photos. My phones memory for photos is 2.3G but on my Mini it’s 11.3G. HOW CAN THAT BE??????? I have synced and still only have about 9G in the cloud, where is the other 2g coming from??
I have racked my brain and searched online for an answer and am coming up empty. Does anyone have an answer for me?? And yes, I have “optimize my space” checked on my mini.
I beg for some help

 

[twerppoet]

Not sure this will be much help. This is mostly guesses and supposes.

Optimize doesn’t reduce photos by a specific ratio. It is supposed to look at several metrics like; how much space is left on your device, how often you look at certain photos, and how recent the photos are. Based on that it reduces the size of photos stored on your device to achieve a compromise between speed of responce and local storage use.

So, how much storge you have open on your device is more important than how much storage the device has total.

Given that your local library size on the Mini is larger than the one in iCloud, that can’t be all that is going on.

Are either of your devices updated to iOS 11? iOS 11 intoduced a more efficient file format for photos and videos. It’s likley that Apple has been converting all iCloud files to the new format. If the iPad Mini is still on iOS 10, then the same number of photos may take more space. More importantly, old photos are not converted when you update. Only new photos, so any videos or photos taken since the update will be smaller (unless you’ve disabled this feature).

Still, it does not sound like the Mini is optimizing your photo storage at all.

Make sure you are not using iCloud Photo Sharing or the new redundant Photo Stream. Both of these will store photos separately from the main iCloud Photo Library.