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I have hundreds of thousands of photos I want to store completely on iCloud and remove them from my computer storage entirely

Can I completely store all of my photos on iCloud while removing them from my computer storage entirely?

MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Jul 15, 2020 3:50 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 15, 2020 4:12 PM

No. iCloud Photos is a syncing service. Any photo you delete from a device where iCloud Photos is turned on will also be deleted from iCloud and from any other device connected to iCloud Photos. You can potentially reduce the storage space required on a device by turning on Optimize Storage. See: Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support


Apple does not currently offer cloud-only storage for photos. If that is what you want or need, you may want to explore 3rd party options such as Google Photos or Dropbox.


1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 15, 2020 4:12 PM in response to abowser1

No. iCloud Photos is a syncing service. Any photo you delete from a device where iCloud Photos is turned on will also be deleted from iCloud and from any other device connected to iCloud Photos. You can potentially reduce the storage space required on a device by turning on Optimize Storage. See: Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support


Apple does not currently offer cloud-only storage for photos. If that is what you want or need, you may want to explore 3rd party options such as Google Photos or Dropbox.


I have hundreds of thousands of photos I want to store completely on iCloud and remove them from my computer storage entirely

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