Deleting photos/videos from Macbook Air but keep them on icloud storage

You dont’t have to buy TimeMachine: it’s already on your Mac. In TimeMachine, Options: check if the external drive with your photolibrary is included

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

To move your complete photolibrary to an external drive: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Most external drives work for TimeMachine backups on your Mac. It’s possible you need to reformat it

Types of disks you can use with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

You can use a TimeCapsule, but a cheaper external drive (you even don’t need a SSD) works fine. The first TimeMachine backup can take a very long time, but that doesn’t really matter. New backups are much faster after the first one has been made.

if you need further assistance, feel free to ask

iCloud on your Mac is a sync service. This means that if you delete a file on your mac it will be deleted everywhere.

You could include your external drive in your TimeMachine backup. It's hardly recommended to make backups

I have a similar situation. I know that when you take pictures and videos on an iPhone and back sent via iCloud so that is great but when I decide to try to delete the photos off of device, is it a remaining in the iCloud as a back up at the race there as well. The only way I’ve been able to do it is to wait for I close the back everything up then I have to wipe my phone and set it up as a new device no back up and then I can see the photos there as thumbnails and they do not download onto the phone as far as I can tell so they are in the cloud but that’s a crazy way of having to do things. If someone could provide some clarification on how best to remove the actual photos and videos from a device and Heather still remain backed up via iCloud, that would be great.

I read an article about how you can remove the photos from an iPhone, for example and still leave them in the cloud. They recommend turning off iCloud sync on the device and once it is off, delete the photos, the one off of the iPhone and then when you turn iCloud sync back on it will not delete the photos from the iCloud side of things. Maybe this will work for the Mac as well? You would have to make sure that the photos are backed up an iCloud and then go in and cut off the sink and delete whatever photos you want from the Mac and then when you re-enable to sync, it should not delete those photos because I did not see them on the Mac anymore, and they never existed. Let me see if I can find that article. It is not from Apple though.

thank you for the information. Ideally, I would like to be able to just back up all of my photos on to the external drive. Don’t care about documents or contacts just the photos because I can use iCloud for those other items. Is that possible?

Yes, you can exclude e.g. Documents from a backup on an external drive, but it’s not recommended: iCloud on your Mac is a sync service. This means that if you delete a file on your Mac, it will also be deleted from iCloud.

https://www.lifewire.com/delete-photos-from-iphone-but-not-icloud-5219768

does Apple make an external drive that will work with MacBooks? I know they used to have something called a time capsule. Not sure if that’s something they still sell or make.