In the last 2 years since we both bought a 64 GB iPhone 6 Plus, my wife has rarely deleted photos and videos from her phone. Today she received the above error message. Given that everyone has a finite amount of space on their phones, I thought I'd share my "phonetography" workflow on iOS and macOS. This of course applies to both iPhones and iPads.
1) Take pictures, lots of them. Why not? Storage space is cheap, and memories are precious. Fire away. Turn on HDR and save both the regular and HDR versions. Record video in the maximum resolution and maximum frame rate. View them in Photos for iOS.
2) Periodically sync to Google Photos. As long as you have a Google account, you can upload an unlimited number of photos to your account, provided that you allow Google to apply some compression to your photos. While you currently get 15 GB if you save the original full resolution images from your phones, I think a small amount of compression (no noticeable difference in image quality in my opinion) is worth having unlimited storage. Two reasons for this: most people take rather mediocre smartphone photos and this option is just a backup for hard drive disasters.
3) After syncing to Google Photos, sync photos to Photos for macOS (formerly iPhoto). This will include your original unaltered photos, plus any in-phone edits you might have applied. Also backup these photos to at least 1 (preferably more) external hard drives to insulate against hard drive failure on your main Mac.
4) Only after completing steps 2 and 3, go back and delete photos that you do not need immediately accessible on your phone. Keep the ones you absolutely want to have on your phone, knowing that you have full-resolution backups on Photos for macOS (and external hard drives) as well as your entire library available in the cloud on Google Photos which can be accessed anywhere that you have an internet connection. If you are judicious about preserving a selected number of "keepers" on your phone, you should rarely run into trouble with running out of space on your phone--at least not due to photos.
If you have a workflow and archival programs you'd like to share, leave a comment!
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