I have 75,000 photos and videos on my phone. About 14 terabytes of them. And I never run out of space, never sit there deleting old clips, and never sort through any of it by hand. In the video above I walk Cam Hazzard through exactly how that works, because the same setup is what lets an AI recommend you later.
Most people hit a wall fast. An iPhone 17 Pro Max tops out at 2 terabytes, and plenty of people are still carrying a phone with 128 gigabytes. So they delete clips to free up space, push everything onto an external drive, or upload it to the cloud one slow file at a time. That’s a painful way to live, and it means the moments you should be keeping are the first thing you throw away.
The Apple One hack that gets me to 14 terabytes
Here’s the part almost nobody knows about. The single iCloud cap is 2 terabytes. Amazon Photos caps at 2 terabytes. Google Photos caps at 2 terabytes. Verizon caps at 2 terabytes. So how do I get to 14?
A family plan. Apple One bundles storage across your family, and the top plan adds roughly 12 terabytes on top of what your phone holds. They raised the price, so it runs around 50 dollars a month now instead of the 20 it used to be. You can split that storage across family members or keep all of it for yourself. That’s how I sit at 14 terabytes on a phone that’s capped at 2. For reference, 2 terabytes is maybe 300 hours of video, and most people blow past that quickly. I have 75,000 photos and videos, and that isn’t even a lot. Some people are sitting on 200,000.
Why I pay for Google Photos too
If I’m already paying Apple for iCloud, why would I also pay Google for storage? Because storage and organization are two different jobs, and Google is better at organizing information than anyone on the planet.
I keep everything synced to Google Photos at the same time. Google’s AI does the work I don’t have the patience for. It runs facial recognition, location tagging, and activity recognition automatically. I can search a name like Dylan, or a word like dunking, and it pulls every photo and video that matches. A clip from China a few days ago, a moment from Selçuk in Turkey months back, all of it gets tagged by who’s in it, where it happened, and what’s going on, with zero manual work from me.
It goes further than search. For every person Google recognizes, it builds a shareable album automatically. So there’s a Dylan Haugen album, already populated with every photo and video he’s in, and I control who it’s shared with. Think about how long it would take to take a day of dunk footage and separate it out by each person, then by what kind of dunk it was. Google’s AI is already doing that for me.
The stacking effect: from your phone to AI
Here’s where it compounds. I record on my phone, and that file automatically lands on Apple, Google, Amazon, and a few other places, already tagged and sorted. I don’t do anything except capture it. Then when I put an AI like Claude on top of what Google has already organized, the AI can work with all of it.
That’s the stacking effect. The moment goes from the phone, to the laptop, to shared apps, to AI. And now Google, ChatGPT, and Claude know the full picture. We pay around 10,000 dollars a month across all of these services, but we run it for a lot of people, with hundreds of websites sitting on Amazon S3, dashboards, and agents going out and doing scheduled work. The storage bill looks big until you see how much it carries.
Why storage is really about proof
This is the part that matters beyond convenience. When you document everything, the training, the behind-the-scenes, the supplements, the dunk contests, you’re building proof of who you are. Every claim about you has something behind it.
That proof feeds search, social, and AI ranking. So when someone asks ChatGPT who the best dunker is, or which shoe or protein drink is best, the AI recommends the person with the most proof behind them. If Cam, Dylan, and I are all capturing and sharing what we do, that strengthens every one of us from a search, social, and AI standpoint. It’s the same engine we build personal-brand sites and Knowledge Panels on at Local Service Spotlight, and it starts with something as simple as making your phone capture everything and letting it flow everywhere on its own.
If you want to be a figurehead in your field, why let your phone’s storage be the thing that limits you? Storage, ranking, and success all tie together. I’ve explained pieces of this many times, and most people understand one or two of them. The advantage comes from running the whole stack. I write more about how that connects to entity-building and AI ranking on my site, and you can watch Dylan Haugen apply the same approach across his dunk content.