Do Live Photos Take Up More Storage? Real Numbers
Live Photos store a still plus a motion clip, so they run roughly 2 to 3x a normal photo. Here's the real math, and what actually frees the space back.
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Yes. A Live Photo is roughly two to three times the size of the same shot taken as a plain still, because it saves two things: the photo, and a short video clip of the 1.5 seconds before and after you pressed the shutter.
That’s the answer. The more useful part is what to do about it, and here most guides go wrong in an identical way. They tell you to open a Live Photo, tap LIVE, choose Off, and enjoy the space you just recovered.
You almost certainly didn’t recover any.
Yes, and by how much
One Live Photo is a single item in your library carrying two files: the still you actually look at, plus a second resource holding the motion. That pairing is why it weighs what it does.
Using the figures our Live Photos Storage Calculator defaults to (about 5 MB for the still, about 8 MB for the clip), the difference at scale looks like this:
| Library size | As plain stills | As Live Photos |
|---|---|---|
| 1 shot | ~5 MB | ~13 MB |
| 1,000 shots | ~4.9 GB | ~12.7 GB |
| 5,000 shots | ~24 GB | ~63 GB |
Five thousand photos is not an unusual camera roll. That’s a roughly 39 GB difference on a phone you probably bought with 128 GB, made entirely of clips you have never watched. For a wider view of what a big library costs, we broke down how much space 10,000 photos take.
What a Live Photo actually stores
Under the hood, one Live Photo is a single library asset with two resources attached: the still image and a paired video. Apple’s own developer docs name the second one pairedVideo, which is about as plain a statement as you’ll get that it’s a separate piece of data riding along with the picture.
The format matters. If your phone is set to High Efficiency, the still is HEIF and the clip is HEVC, both of which compress better than JPEG and H.264 at the same visual quality. Set to Most Compatible, everything is bigger.
One gotcha for people who shoot RAW: Live Photos aren’t available at all when ProRAW or HEIF Max is turned on. If you’ve wondered why the Live badge disappears in certain modes, that’s why.
How much space that really costs, and how to check your own
One thing worth stating plainly: Apple has never published a Live Photo file size. Every MB figure you’ve read, including the ones above, is somebody’s estimate.
The estimates in circulation disagree by a factor of three. At the low end you’ll see about 2 to 3 MB for the HEIC still plus 2 to 4 MB for the clip, so 4 to 6 MB all in. At the high end it’s around 5 MB for the still and 8 MB for the clip, landing near 13 MB. Everyone does agree on the multiplier, though: roughly 2x to 3x a plain still.
That spread isn’t sloppy reporting. Resolution, HDR, lighting, and how much movement is in the frame all change the size of the clip. A Live Photo of a still landscape compresses far smaller than one of a dog shaking itself dry.
Get your own number in thirty seconds
Skip the averages and measure your actual library:
- Open the Photos app and pick a Live Photo.
- Swipe up on the image, or tap the info button.
- Read the file size iOS shows you.
- Do the same for a plain still shot on the same day, in similar light.
The gap between those two numbers is your real per-shot Live Photo tax. Multiply it by however many Live Photos you have, or drop your own figures into the Live Photos Storage Calculator and let it scale the total for you.
The iCloud bill
With iCloud Photos on, both resources sync at full size. The clip is not left behind on the device, and it is not stored at reduced quality. It counts.
Apple’s free tier is 5 GB. In the US, iCloud+ runs $0.99 a month for 50 GB, $2.99 for 200 GB, and $9.99 for 2 TB. A library of Live Photos is one of the most common reasons people cross from one tier to the next without ever deciding to. The iCloud Storage Cost Calculator will tell you which tier your library actually needs.
How to turn Live Photos off, and make it stick
Turning it off for future shots is the easy, genuine win. It halves the cost of every photo you take from now on.
In the Camera app, make sure you’re in Photo mode. Swipe up from the mode row at the bottom of the screen (or just tap Photo) to bring up the controls, then tap Live. On recent iOS versions, tapping it again cycles through three states rather than two:
- Live Off puts the camera back to plain stills.
- Live On captures a Live Photo every time.
- Live Auto lets the phone decide when a shot is worth the clip.
Live Auto is a fair compromise and almost nobody mentions it. Just be clear that it still produces Live Photos, so it saves less than Off.
The setting that stops it turning itself back on
This is the step people miss, and it’s why “I already turned it off” and “my photos are still huge” coexist so often. Apple states outright that the Camera app turns Live Photos back on automatically.
The fix: Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings > Live Photo.
Read that switch carefully, because it’s phrased backwards from how it behaves. Turning it on does not enable Live Photos. It tells Camera to remember whatever you last chose, including Off.
While you’re there, Settings > Camera > Indicators > Live Photo keeps the badge on screen so you always know which mode you’re shooting in.
One compounding win
Settings > Camera > Formats > High Efficiency shrinks both halves of every photo you take, Live or not. It stacks with the Live toggle and costs you nothing on any iPhone from the 7 onward.
Android: same trade-off, different name
Google calls it Motion Photos (bundled with Top Shot on Pixel). Open the Camera app’s settings and set Motion Photos to Auto or Off. Samsung has a Motion Photo toggle right in the Camera app, capturing a few seconds before the shutter.
Same mechanic, same fix.
Should you turn it off at all?
Not everywhere. Live Photos genuinely earn their space on kids, pets, and anything moving, and the Key Photo picker has rescued a lot of blinked-at group shots.
What they don’t earn their space on: receipts, whiteboards, parking-space reminders, wine labels, screenshots of things in the real world, and every photo of a menu you’ll never open again. That’s the category that quietly fills a phone. Live Auto handles the split reasonably well if you don’t want to think about it.
What doesn’t free up space (the part most guides get wrong)
Everything above only affects photos you haven’t taken yet. For the thousands already on your phone, two pieces of common advice don’t work.
Edit > LIVE > Off does not delete the motion clip. It’s an edit, and edits in Photos are revertible. Apple’s own Mac Photos documentation lists converting a Live Photo to a still under editing, right next to “Revert to Original.” The motion data has to still be there for Revert to be possible.
Duplicate as Still Photo makes a second item. It doesn’t shrink the first one. Best case that’s a wash. There’s a long-running Apple Community thread with 375 “me too” votes from people who measured it, and one reports that after converting and deleting the original, the duplicated still was the exact same size as the Live Photo it came from, and could still be reverted to Live.
So the honest version: the only reliable way to get those bytes back is to delete the Live Photos you don’t want.
And then one more step, which is where the “I deleted 5 GB and nothing changed” complaint comes from. Deleted photos move to Recently Deleted and sit there for about 30 days, still occupying storage. Empty that album or nothing changes. If your storage bar still hasn’t moved after that, we walk through the other reasons deleting photos doesn’t free space.
A faster way to clear the ones you don’t want
Deleting Live Photos in the stock Photos app has an obvious problem: you can’t see which ones are heavy. Every thumbnail looks the same size.
That’s the gap Swipe44 fills. It shows an approximate size badge on every card as you swipe, so the 13 MB Live Photo of a parking sign is visibly different from the 2 MB screenshot next to it. Swipe right to keep, left to mark. Your roll comes as monthly decks so a five-thousand-photo library is a finite set of small jobs rather than one infinite scroll.
Near-identical shots get grouped on-device by perceptual hashing, which matters here because Live Photos taken in quick succession cluster hard. Everything you mark lands in a pending pile you review before anything is destroyed, then goes in one batch with a single system confirmation. At the end you get a real freed-space figure rather than a guess.
It runs entirely on-device. No account, nothing uploaded, and iCloud originals are never downloaded just to be looked at.
Worth being precise: Swipe44 does not strip motion clips out of Live Photos. Nothing does that reliably. It helps you find the ones you don’t want and get rid of them, which is the part that actually returns storage. If you’d rather start with a plan, here’s how to clean up a camera roll fast, or you can just get the app.
The short version
Live Photos cost you roughly double, sometimes triple. Turning them off in Camera and pinning it with Preserve Settings genuinely halves what every future shot costs, and takes about twenty seconds.
For the ones already on your phone, ignore the advice about the editor toggle. Measure a couple of real files, work out what your library is holding, then delete the Live Photos you were never going to watch and empty Recently Deleted.
More on getting a camera roll under control on the blog, or browse the storage calculators.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Do Live Photos take up more storage than regular photos?
Yes, roughly 2 to 3 times as much, because each one stores a still image plus a motion clip covering the 1.5 seconds either side of the shutter.
How many MB is a Live Photo?
Apple doesn't publish a figure. On a modern iPhone shooting HEIF, expect somewhere between about 4 MB and 13 MB per Live Photo versus 2 to 5 MB for the same shot as a plain still. Check your own by reading the file size in the Photos info panel.
Does turning off Live Photos free up space on photos I've already taken?
No. The Camera toggle only affects new shots. Existing Live Photos keep their motion clips until you delete them.
Does converting a Live Photo to a still photo save storage?
Usually not. Turning LIVE off in the editor is a revertible edit, so iOS keeps the motion data, and Duplicate as Still Photo adds a second library item rather than shrinking the first. Deleting the Live Photos you don't want is what actually frees space.
How do I turn off Live Photos permanently on iPhone?
Turn Live off in Camera, then go to Settings, Camera, Preserve Settings and switch on Live Photo so the Camera app stops resetting to Live every time you open it.
What is Live Auto?
A third Camera state on recent iOS versions that lets the phone decide when a shot is worth capturing as a Live Photo. It's a reasonable middle ground, but it still produces Live Photos, so it won't cut storage as much as Live Off.
Do Live Photos count against iCloud storage?
Yes. With iCloud Photos on, both the still and the motion clip sync at full size and count against your quota, which is what pushes people from the free 5 GB onto a paid iCloud+ tier.
Are Android Motion Photos the same thing?
Effectively yes. Pixel calls it Top Shot or Motion Photos and Samsung calls it Motion Photo. Both bundle a short clip with the still and can be set to off or auto in the Camera app's settings.
I deleted a bunch of Live Photos and my storage didn't change. Why?
They're sitting in Recently Deleted, where photos stay for about 30 days and still occupy space. Empty that album to actually get the storage back.