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Early reporting from BGR.com suggests that, while any OS upgrade will slow all phones down temporarily while objects get re-indexed, some iPhone users, especially those with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, have reported lasting battery life effects. These users have been running iOS 11 since last week, when the Gold Master was released.

The author suggests users might try throttling back background refresh and location access settings:

If you experience faster battery drain after updating to iOS 11, there are a few things you can do to potentially extend your battery life. The two big ones are limiting the number of apps that can refresh in the background (Settings > General > Background App Refresh) and limiting the number of apps that can access your location in the background (Settings > Privacy > Location Services). If that doesn’t have much of an impact, Low Power Mode may become your best friend until Apple pushes out new updates in the coming months that will hopefully address excessive battery drain.

The author also wrote a separate article with additional information on how to lighten the load on your device.

My wife has already upgraded both her iPad Air 2 and iPhone 7 Plus to the new operating system, and is currently installing the watchOS upgrade onto her first generation Apple Watch. I have exactly the same kit, but have done none of this so far, partly because it hasn't been on my radar, partly because I doubt I'd have made the time to do it even if it was, but also partly because I haven't yet been overtaken by the potential coolness and anticipation.

But I'm also putting off the upgrade until I have another task completed: clearing the clutter of old photos off of the phone.

I have the Microsoft OneDrive app on my iPhone. It's there really for one reason: to make backups of all of the photos I take. Now, you might say, "Well, you already have backups of all of your photos in iCloud." True. But here's the rub: deleting photos from my phone also deletes them from iCloud. Actually, deletes them from all of my Apple Devices AND from iCloud. So thumbing through the All Photos album means I have to see every. single. picture. Some of these, I just want archived in a way where I can forget about them. I'm not saying they're unimportant photos; I'm just saying that I don't need to scroll through the 200 images of Papa's birthday celebration every time I'm looking for a particular image. The OneDrive app has a feature called Camera Upload, and it does exactly what you'd expect: grabs all of the images off of the camera roll that aren't already uploaded to OneDrive and pushes them up. Once done, they're away from iCloud and the iPhone, and I can prune the photos on the phone to my heart's content.

I could keep the Camera Upload feature on all of the time, but that would mean that every photo I took would get uploaded in near real-time. I prefer instead to keep the feature turned off and do some rudimentary culling first to clear out junk like images I download for one-time use. Images like those don't really have any meaning beyond, say, the context of a conversation, so I don't feel the need to persist them anywhere. So every couple of months I'll go through my photos, delete the ones that can be deleted, then fire up OneDrive and activate Camera Upload. Once the images are done being copied, I'll shut Camera Upload off again.

Copying and culling photos like this is a great way to cut down on the number of objects getting indexed by the OS. The indexing supports Spotlight search, making searching for specific objects super fast. Major OS releases (like iOS 11) always reindex EVERYTHING at first — all of your contacts, all of your photos, and so on, and it takes time and power to redo the entire index. And by power, I mean battery life.