This should be simple. My iPhone got full of photos. I signed into iCloud and synced them all to iCloud (selecting the "optimize" option to keep lower resolution photos on my phone). After all this, the only photos that are on my phone are from the current year. All others are gone. Fortunately, they are still on iCloud (unless some other undocumented deletion is pending). What happened?
iPhone 6s
I should also mention that this operation has freed up over 2GB in space on the iPhone - so in that regard it has been very "successful". For completeness, the iCloud account has 200GB of space, of which 138GB is free.
Here is an update: After a few days the optimized photos have all trickled into the iPhone and they are all now there, with the result that there is now 1GB of storage free on the iPhone.
Thanks to all who have advised.
hello eric. i have a similar problem. i have my icloud data on my iphone but i have to download it everytime i want to see those videos. i was a new user and didn't knew my options. now i ust want my videos back from icloud on my iphone so that i dont have to be online to watch those videos.
Are you getting any indications the sync is still in progress? The photos sync is very, very slow. With that many photos, the sync may take a couple of days or more.
You are welcome. The low resolution, optimized versions of the photos may still need to be downloaded from iCloud. Have you checked the Photos app for any updates?
I'll guess the sync is not complete yet.
How many photos/videos in the library?
Thanks for your reply. There were 19,500 photos on the phone going back to 2009. The phone now only has photos from 2019 on it. All photos are (currently) on iCloud.
Hi Eric, thanks for your reply. All of the photos have been synced to iCloud, up to and including those taken yesterday. The iPhone itself only has the photos taken in 2019 on it.
You are welcome.
Why did iCloud remove all my old photos from my phone after I synced them all to iCloud?
