my photos storage dropped ~50 gigabytes?

[u/mollyzzzblub]

basically the title. i’ve been fighting with my photos storage for a while, i have ~1200 photos and didnt want to delete them, so i’ve been offloading and reinstalling larger apps like instagram and spotify as i needed them. i just got off work and checked my phone to reinstall spotify and my photos storage dropped to 7gb? nothing is deleted but i don’t purposely save anything to the cloud so idk what happened!!

[u/JediMeister]

Are you paying for iCloud+ and is Optimize iPhone Storage on?