Yep. I'm in my early 40's, recently self-hosted Immich, imported the archive of photos and videos my wife and I have created since 2000, and we're sitting at 216,000 photos, 5000 videos, 650gb+ of data. 2000-2011ish was point-and-shoot digital + DSLR, then 2012-2024 has been the output of TWO CELL PHONES.

We aren't photographers, we just goof around, and our almost-teenaged son doesn't factor into those numbers.

The sheer volume of data created is just .. it's nuts. And there's another 300gb of data generated from all the metadata, sidecar, smart search, face detection! Imagine all that plus much more that Apple Intelligence generates.

Long gone are the days of just putting JPGs into a folder!

But since it’s a shared album, most of that lives in the cloud and not locally cached.

If I was betting, most people likely pay for a cloud storage solution and don’t use the majority of their device storage.