How do I download and/or delete pictures in my iCloud storage account?

Question

How do I download and/or delete pictures in my iCloud storage account?

I logged in to iCloud.com, and went to photos/recent. I had upped my iCloud storage to 50 Gigs a couple of years ago and every day I'm getting warnings that my iCloud storage is nearly full, do I want to upgrade further. No... I don't. What I'd like to do is scan through the 49.9 Gigs of whatever and delete stuff I no longer need. I'm also thinking I might want to _move_ some/all of the pictures to a local HDD. What do I have to do to remove selected images but keep them on my devices? IOW, how do I cut down on the amount of pictures stored in the iCloud Drive but leave them on my iMac, iPhone, or iPad?

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 10.14

Posted on May 14, 2022 2:02 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

muguy

Level 9

76,165 points

May 14, 2022 3:29 PM in response to LightningMike

If you sync with iCloud, all of your pictures and images are affected by anything you do on a connected device. So, deleting a picture in the cloud, or on a device, deletes it everywhere.

You can turn off iCloud sync

Or, you can move pictures to a different library on your Mac and use your system library in Photos for only those items that you wish to sync

Reply

Answer 2

May 16, 2022 9:09 AM in response to muguy

Thank you for the response. I'm a senior (79) and while I understand a lot of normal things with my iMac. iPad, and iPhone... its the little details like this that puzzle me. OK, so if I go into photos on my iMac and select a quantity of images, I can _move_ them to a specific directory on my USB external HDD and without changing settings those photos will not be sync'd or wind up using my iCloud space?

And... if I connect my iPhone to the iMac I won't see those moved images on the iPhone? When I go to iPhone Storage/iCloud Photos the word "Enable" is blue and the note says I can save 58+ GB if I store all the photos and videos on iCloud so I don't think sync is on but correct me if I'm wrong. What I really want to do with my iPhone is move at least half the photos (about 35 Gigs) on the phone over to a storage folder on my iMac's USB external drive. This is difficult to do on the iPhone itself, so I'm looking for a faster way to look/select from the iPhone but do it all on my Mac.

Thanks again for trying to help me out.-Mike

Reply

How do I download and/or delete pictures in my iCloud storage account?

Similar questions