Hey everyone, I have a question about managing my iCloud photo syncing between my iPhone and iPad. I've got almost 10,000 photos, and my phone's running out of storage. If I turn off iCloud syncing for photos on my iPhone, I see it says it will delete all my photos from the phone. But, I don't want to lose everything—I just want to get rid of a lot of them. If I do end up deleting them from my phone, will that also delete them from my iPad or the iCloud? Am I able to keep some photos on my iPhone afterward? I can't select the 'download and keep originals' option because I don't have enough storage. Sorry if this sounds silly, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed about the whole situation!
2 Answers
You might want to follow the 3-2-1 rule for storing your photos! Make three copies: two on different hard drives and one in the cloud. This way, you can delete photos from your iPhone without worrying about losing them entirely. But just a heads-up, if you delete photos from your iPhone, it will also remove them from iCloud and your iPad too since iCloud syncs everything across devices.
You really need to manage how your photos are stored. You can either keep full copies on both your device and in iCloud or just store them in the cloud with only thumbnails on your iPhone. Unfortunately, there's no way to pick and choose which photos stay on your iPhone if you're syncing with iCloud. If storage is an issue, think about exporting photos to your computer before you start deleting them, because once you do, they'll be gone from everywhere synced with iCloud. Videos can also take up a lot of space, so consider clearing those out first!
Exactly! Deleting them from one device means they're gone from all. It's a bummer because you can’t selectively keep photos on one device without affecting the others.