iCloud storage full? Here’s what you can do

First, check what’s using the space

On your iPhone, open Settings → your name → iCloud. You’ll see how much goes to Photos, backups, Messages and iCloud Drive. Quite often the culprit isn’t your photos but a backup of an old phone you no longer use. Delete it, and you may not need to move anything at all.

Option 1. Clean up your library

• Videos take the most room. Start with long clips you never watch again.
• Screenshots, duplicates, bursts. The Photos app has a Duplicates album and lets you browse by media type.
• Important: with iCloud Photos on, a photo you delete on your iPhone disappears from iCloud and from all your devices. It stays in Recently Deleted for 30 days, and the space is only freed once it’s gone for good.

The upside: it’s free. The downside: you have to let go of pictures, and in six months you’ll be out of space again.

Option 2. Buy more iCloud+ storage

The simplest route if you live in Apple’s world: nothing to move, and everything keeps syncing as before. The price depends on your country — you’ll see it in iCloud settings.

The catch: you pay forever while your library keeps growing. And by default Apple holds the keys to your photos — end-to-end encryption (Advanced Data Protection) exists, but it’s off by default.

Option 3. Move part of your library elsewhere

Your wedding, past trips, the kids’ photos from earlier years — things you rarely open but can’t afford to lose. Move them out of iCloud and make room for new shots.

• External drive — cheap, but drives fail and get lost. Keep at least two copies in different places.
• Another cloud — convenient, but the big cloud services usually hold the keys to your files too.
• My Albums — an encrypted cloud right inside Telegram. More below.

How My Albums helps

• Nothing to install. It’s a mini app inside Telegram, on iPhone, Android and computer. No Apple ID, no Google account.
• Originals, uncompressed. HEIC, JPEG and video — plus RAW and TIFF from a computer. Up to 20 GB per file.
• Encrypted on your phone. Files are encrypted (AES-256-GCM) before upload. The key is created on your device and never reaches our server, so we can’t see your photos. You can check this yourself.
• Easy to find things. Albums, people tags, search by name, event, date and place. Search runs on your phone too.
• First year free — 5 GB, no card. After that: 50, 100 or 250 GB for 100, 200 or 500 ⭐ a month (about $2, $4 or $10), paid with Telegram Stars.

Honest about price: we are not cheaper than iCloud. You’re not paying for gigabytes — you’re paying for gigabytes nobody but you can open. If you stop paying, your photos aren’t deleted: you can still view and download them; only new uploads pause.

How to move photos from iCloud to My Albums

1. Open @MyAlbumsBot, tap Start, then Open photos. On first launch, save the 52-character recovery code somewhere other than your phone.
2. From an iPhone: Upload tab → Choose from gallery. Pick up to 30 photos or 5 videos at a time and keep Telegram open while it uploads. If Optimize iPhone Storage is on, your iPhone first downloads each original from iCloud — that’s why you may see pauses.
3. A big library is easier from a computer. Download your photos from iCloud (via iCloud.com, Photos on a Mac, or iCloud for Windows). Then, in Telegram Desktop, open My Albums → Upload → “Choose a folder — it becomes an album”. Subfolders become separate albums.
4. Open a few originals in My Albums and make sure everything is there.
5. Only then delete the moved photos in the Photos app and empty Recently Deleted — that’s when iCloud space is freed.

Keep one more independent copy of photos you could never replace. My Albums keeps your originals, but it should be part of your backup plan, not the whole plan.

Frequently asked questions