iCloud photo storage effect on iPhone of a 400GB library

Question

iCloud photo storage effect on iPhone of a 400GB library

Hi all

I have a 2018 iMac with 1TB fusion drive and a 65GB iPhone X

My photo library on the Mac currently sits at about 400Gb with some 40,000 photos and videos.

Its safely backed up in several places but I was considering using iCloud photos but I’ve heard some nightmare stories about what happens to your phone with a library that size.

Apple Le doesn’t really make it clear what happens to the phones storage capacity if I switch iCloud Photo Library on on both the Mac and the phone and tick the optimise storage.

Ive heard that my phone will just fill up with optimised images and it will use all the phone storage and I’ll be forever trying to create space without deleting any photos as these will then be gone from the cloud as well.

I was hoping to use iCloud to simply the task of making sure all our previous family photos get stored somewhere safe automatically.

Currently I grab all the families phones at the end of the month, import all the new

images. Organise them how I want within photos then copy those photos over to a NAS drive which is then backed up to another external drive and all the photos are automatically uploaded to Dropbox (you can probably tell that I’ve had a drive failure before with no back ups!).

Is is there an easier way or is iCloud photos going to cause me issues.

Thanks

iPhone X, 12

Posted on Feb 5, 2019 3:03 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

léonie

Level 10

195,113 points

Feb 5, 2019 12:17 PM in response to StevenBottrill

An optimized library on an iPhone will roughly need 10% if the size of your Photos Library on your Mac, perhaps a bit more. It will depend on the format and size of the images in your library. I converted most of my photos to the Heic format and my optimized library on my iPhone X needs 20% of the size of the library in iCloud. With a library of 400GB on your Mac you should expect that the iPhotos synced from Cloud Photos Library to the iPhone will need at least 40GB of storage on your iPhone. Is that feasible for you?

But do you want to switch to iCloud Photos Library to have a backup? iCloud Photos Library is perfect for keeping your Photos Library in sync across several devices, but you still need to backup your photos. Because of the syncing any user error will sync across all devices. You cannot recover photos you deleted or modified from iCloud Photos.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

195,113 points

Feb 5, 2019 12:37 PM in response to StevenBottrill

A Photos Library must not be stored in a synced folder. Putting the library into your DropBox or on Google Drive will damage it by the syncing, because it will break the internal links. See: Updating from iPhoto to Photos for OS X - Apple Support

If you store your Photos library in a location that's part of a cloud service (for example, Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive), your library might be damaged by the syncing process. As a result, you could lose photos.

To see your photos on all your devices, you can use iCloud Photo Library. To back up your library, you can use Time Machine.

More is described here: Where is it safe to store a Photos Librar… - Apple Community

If you want to use iCloud Photos to sync photos to your iPhone, you could use a smaller Photos Library with just your favorietsfor iCloud. That is what I am doing. I am keeping a larger archive of all my photos on an external drive, and a smaller library with my favorites is syncing with iCloud.

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Answer 3

Feb 5, 2019 12:23 PM in response to léonie

Thanks for the advice it’s exactly what I was after.

yes I was looking at it as another type of back up (and to free up a bit of space on the iMac) but I just don’t have 40GB to spare on my iPhone.

maybe you can answer this question as well

inhsve Dropbox enabled on my iMac with a few folders in there, nothing much. Could I move the photos library file to the Dropbox folder and run it from there. As I understand it the file would still sit on the iMac but would also upload to Dropbox if I ask it to.

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iCloud photo storage effect on iPhone of a 400GB library

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