Question about syncing photos and deleting them

I do this by having two Libraries on my Mac. There is a main archive library that has all my pictures, but it isn't connected to iCloud. Another Library has only the "Favorites," and it is the System Library that is connected to iCloud. So pictures from my phone appear in Favorites. I then copy them to my Mac and organize them into albums and crop, edit, and rate them in the main Library where it's so much easier than on a phone. Then I copy the edited favorites in the archive back to the Favorites library for showing to other people when I only have my phone or iPad.

I use PowerPhotos ($30) to help with the copying.

I just reread your post, and I'm not sure I understand what you mean by: "I just want to sync some, or all of the remaining photos to the phone, but not all"

If you want to have exactly the same pictures on the Mac and on the phone, iCloud does that automatically without having two libraries. Just have them both connected to iCloud, and then whatever edits or deletes you make on your Mac will be synchronized with the phone. That's what iCloud does.

I hope one of these things is what you were asking...

When you are syncing with iCloud Photos, the Photos Library on the iPhone will always be identical to the library on your, automatically. This is making working with multiple devices easy.

• Any photos or video you import on one device will automatically appear on the other device.
• Any photos or video you delete on one device will automatically be deleted from the other device.
• Metadata or faces or albums and folders or adjustments you add will automatically appear on the other device.

The draw-back of iCloud Photos is, that you have to plan the size of the Photos Library on your Mac so it will fit easily on your other devices - the bottleneck will be the device with the least storage. But it is making working with photos on several devices very easy. The second drawback is that we need to subscribe for more cloud storage, but the added bonus will be, that we will have an additional of-site storage of our photos and can recover them from iCloud, if the device gets damaged or or lost or stolen. I have been very glad, when I could recover my photos from iCloud, after my office got flooded and all Macs and backup disks have been damaged by the water.

The syncing with a cable is more limited - it is essentially one-way (photos we synced from the Mac to the iPhone cannot be saved back to the Mac and are of a lesser resolution) and it is easy to make mistakes, because we have to remember which items have already been synced before we can delete them from the other device. There is an option "Delete after import" when we import from the iPhone, but it is very risky, because it will erase the photos from the iPhone, before we can check, if they have been downloaded without transmission errors. We will not be able to repeat the download, if some of the photos are corrupted.

vesm01 wrote: Or am I better off using iCloud and its the only way to do this easily?

léonie explained about iCloud-- it is a syncing service that automatically and transparently keeps all the pictures on your phone exactly the same as on your Mac. For her description you can see that it is so much easier using iCloud than doing the cable dance and trying to keep that straight. The only downside is that it costs money: iCloud storage of 200 GB is $3 per month. It took me awhile to decide to use iCloud, but I'm convinced it's worth it.

Keep in mind that iCloud is not a backup. If you delete a picture on your phone, it gets deleted everywhere else, too. (It really goes to "Recently Deleted" where you 30 days to change your mind.) While iCloud always keeps full sized images, I use "Optimize Storage" on my phone to have smaller versions there, and I use "Download Originals" on my Mac so that when I backup my Mac to an external drive, the full sized images get backed up.