Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript

Am I reading this right?

If this is widespread, this could be seen as apple bloating figures to push people to upgrade, which could lead to a lawsuit, no?

IANAL

Interesting article. I have my own problem, that caused me to have to upgrade my iCloud plan, and thus may not be a high priority fix for Apple.

If you shoot RAW+JPEG (not a super-rare thing to do, for photo enthusiasts) then Apple Photos links the two images. Which is useful, rather than having a bunch of kinda-duplicates littering your library you can easily toggle between RAW and JPEG.

But this combining, along with the file system design described in this article, makes it impossible (as far as I can tell, anyway) to easily separate them and delete the RAWs. So years later, I have HUGE RAW files that I'll never touch that I can't delete, because I want to keep the much smaller JPEGS.

Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library.

So I have to upgrade.

I kind of hate opaque cloud solutions like this, because their storage usage is inscrutable and their interfaces are basically never optimized to help you clear things out. Whether that’s intentional and malicious or just not a priority, I don’t really care, I just want to be in control of the stuff I’m using.

I have a very similar issue with iMessage in iCloud, and unlike photos, there’s no web interface. You have to interact with it on your device. Thankfully I have a Mac so I can load up the chat database from there and see what’s using the space, but cleaning it up has been a nightmare: I have a script to find the big attachments, but if I delete them then some agent that manages the database goes into a loop for like five minutes per deletion. Then the change gets synced to iCloud (at least, I assume). So unless I fully reverse what the deletion process does and whether it is possible to do a batch operation I’m basically at the mercy of the front end they provide to clean things up, which as I mentioned earlier is absolutely not designed to make it easy to do this.

Funny, this was may take on the article too. I suppose one could download x amount of files from one cloud storage and upload it to another to see if there is any obvious discrepancy. Perhaps Apple are still using their old file system format for icloud? It's been around for a good few years now and perhaps they simply haven't bothered to ever change the type of storage format they use. Maybe those with older accounts have their images / videos on the 'older' drives?

Compression?