Can I delete my photos in my device once they are in the cloud?

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Can I delete my photos in my device once they are in the cloud?

My iPhone 12 device is almost out of storage. It’s making my iPhone device so slow and can’t open certain links/email, anymore.

However, I have a lot of storage left in the iCloud because I bought extra iCloud storage, thinking I could free up some storage on my iPhone device.

I thought for sure you could do that. Like, For example: If I saved all my photos and videos from my device to the iCloud, I could now delete everything from the Photos app on my device to free up storage space. Since it’s permanently saved in the Cloud.

So my question is; if I save my photos from my device to the cloud-can I now delete all my photos and videos on my device to free up some storage? Or will that delete the iCloud’s saved photos too? I hope I can because my iPhone device needs storage badly. I could delete all my device’ photos and videos because they are safe and secure. But now I’m questioning whether this is true or not. After reading the iCloud guide, just now, it never mentioned anything about this, so I’m now hesitant to delete my photos on my device in case I’m wrong. I don’t ever want to lose those.

So Does Anyone know the answer to this? If I were to save something from my device to the Cloud, can I now delete that from my iPhone device?II pray I'm correct because, if I can delete all my photos from my device, it would free up 40% of my device’s storage!!

Thanks 🙏

iPhone 12, iOS 17

Posted on Dec 8, 2023 11:35 PM

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Answer 1

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FoxFifth

Level 10

475,461 points

Dec 9, 2023 8:44 AM in response to LoveMe5times

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 the following Apple article for more information: 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.

Another way that photos may be on iCloud (if you don’t have iCloud Photos turned on) is via a backup of an iOS device. The only thing you can do with a backup is use it to restore a device or set up a new device. The contents of backups are not viewable at iCloud.com and if you delete a photo from a device it will not be included in future backups and will be lost.

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Can I delete my photos in my device once they are in the cloud?

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