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With Optimised Storage, which iCloud photos will be viewable on an iPhone with small capacity?

Scenario is my husband has a Photos Library on the Mac that is 135GB in size. Currently he is not using iCloud Photos but is planning to do so soon (eek!)

I realise the images will shrink down when syn'c to his iPhone but it will be still way too much for the 64GB iPhone.

So with Optimised Storage turned on in the phone, the iOS presumably decides which photos to download.

Anyone know which are download - is it the most recent? Or random?
What if he wants to look at some photos that are still in the iCloud? Are they visible in the Photos app but just need a second or two to download on demand?

Thanks in advance.

PS he has iPhone 12.

iPhone 7

Posted on Jul 22, 2023 4:22 AM

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

197,613 points

Posted on Jul 22, 2023 8:48 AM

When you use iCloud Photos to sync the media from your Mac to your other devices, the photos and videos will be stored in the full resolution in iCloud. With optimize iPhone Storage you can access access this iCloud Photos Library even from an iPhone with less free storage.

Photos will not download all photos from iCloud in the full resolution. It will try to keep the recently used files in the full resolution however, space permitting, so they can beused instantly againwithout having to download them again. Older files, that have not been used in a long time willget "Optimized".

When I had an iPhone 5s with just 64GB of storage, I could still use an iCloud Photos Library with 200GB of images and videos. It has been working well, as long as I had access to a reliable and fast Wi-Fi. When I could not get a decent internet connection, I could only access the recently viewed photos. When we know, that we will need access to certain photos to show them to someone, while away from the Internet, it helps to collect these photos in an album and to view them enlarged, to force a download, before we are away from the internet.

See: Use iCloud Photos to store photos in iCloud – Apple Support (UK)

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With Optimised Storage, which iCloud photos will be viewable on an iPhone with small capacity?

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