16GB is a way to bully your customers into your atrocious cloud offerings. Fortunately, if you're apple, you can do this and have the customer feel responsible.
I got sick of it over a year ago. The pricing on the six was such that I couldn't conscionably pay for it. There's a reason nobody wants the 128GB - it's damn near a thousand dollars. T-mobile offered to sell me one for $59/mo for two years the same day Nissan offered to lease me a Versa for $79/mo for 2 years and something snapped inside. The sad thing is my sister asked me how to get stuff off her phone so she wouldn't lose her photos (it's literally the only place she's documented her 3-year-old). I pointed her at Flickr 'cuz the app is pretty effective. But in order to do that, she had to upgrade iTunes on her computer so that she could update her iOS but to do that she needed to take photos off iCloud so she could upload different ones so she could have enough room for the new OS so she could download the Flickr app. I'm pretty sure she still hasn't done it and she's got a master's degree.
Yeah, we are in a storage trap atm and haven't put the time in that it will take to get everything working again. I have zero music on my iPhone. I reluctantly take pictures when my wife asks me, and I cannot update to iOS 9.0.1 due to limited storage. My wife's Macbook is full, so we need to do a shuffle before Siri can expand like a goldfish on my phone.
Tellin' you, dude. Ever since Marissa Mayer has decided that fucking up Tumblr is more fun than fucking up Flickr, Flickr's been approaching functionality again. Unlimited storage, nothing's public until you make it, they'll take RAW and it's automagical. That's my Level 2 backup. My Level 1 backup has Dropbox auto-upload everything to the cloud, and then Lightroom watches those Dropbox folders. Fire up Dropbox, it auto-imports and auto-deletes everything in the folders so it's a quick'n'easy transfer. Not only that, but you can auto-tag a bunch of stuff. Then the good stuff gets uploaded to Flickr (department of redundancy department - there's a reason not everything the app grabs is public) and everything gets Rsync'd to the NAS.
I am halfway through an hours-long download of the 9.0.1 firmware. I am also low on storage despite blanking my music library, don't want to pay more for iCloud space, and haven't been able to update over-the-air. I am hoping that this guide will do the trick (no jailbreak, downloads are hosted on apple.com, what could go wrong?): http://www.redmondpie.com/ios-9-beta-download-release-date-features-and-rumors-update/ In the past I have recovered significant space with a backup, factory reset and restore, though it is a chore and an act of faith. Version 9 apparently uses some tricks to save space, but app thinning is broken for now.