I have a mac, phone and ipad, all backed up to iCloud and many many photos. I found my photo library on the mac and dragged it onto my external hard drive and it copied. Is there any reason to also download all my photos from iCloud? I want to make space on my ipad and have turned off syncing to icloud. Do I now need to also delete the photos manually on the ipad? It still shows full. Thank you!
iPad (5th generation)
First-- iCloud does not back up your pictures. iCloud synchronizes your pictures. I have a backup in case I accidentally (or stupidly) delete a picture and later find I really wanted it-- I go to the backup and restore it. But with iCloud, if I delete a picture, it is deleted from iCloud, from my iPhone, and from my iPad-- it's gone from all of them. That's what synchronize means. That's why I have a backup.
Now, do you have "Optimize Storage" chosen, or rather "Download Originals" checked on each of your devices? If you have "Optimize" chosen on your Mac, then what you transferred to your external drive may not be full sized images-- you need to switch to "Download" since you now have the room. Then you need to make a backup of that library after it has download the full sized images.
On your iPad, once you turn off iCloud in Settings>Photos, the iPad is no longer connected to the other devices. Deleting a picture on the Mac won't delete it from the iPad. Taking a picture with the iPad camera won't send it to the Mac.
If you had "Optimize" chosen on your iPad, I would expect it to ask if you want to download the originals before disconnecting. If you don't, you will be left with the smaller versions. If you want more room, you can delete pictures.
Of course, if you leave the iPad connected to iCloud, you can choose "Optimize Storage," so then only smaller pictures would be kept on the iPad. But if you've already done that, and you still want more space, disconnecting and deleting pictures will give it to you.
Well, that sounded a little complicated-- let us know how it goes...
First-- iCloud does not back up your pictures. iCloud synchronizes your pictures. I have a backup in case I accidentally (or stupidly) delete a picture and later find I really wanted it-- I go to the backup and restore it. But with iCloud, if I delete a picture, it is deleted from iCloud, from my iPhone, and from my iPad-- it's gone from all of them. That's what synchronize means. That's why I have a backup.
Now, do you have "Optimize Storage" chosen, or rather "Download Originals" checked on each of your devices? If you have "Optimize" chosen on your Mac, then what you transferred to your external drive may not be full sized images-- you need to switch to "Download" since you now have the room. Then you need to make a backup of that library after it has download the full sized images.
On your iPad, once you turn off iCloud in Settings>Photos, the iPad is no longer connected to the other devices. Deleting a picture on the Mac won't delete it from the iPad. Taking a picture with the iPad camera won't send it to the Mac.
If you had "Optimize" chosen on your iPad, I would expect it to ask if you want to download the originals before disconnecting. If you don't, you will be left with the smaller versions. If you want more room, you can delete pictures.
Of course, if you leave the iPad connected to iCloud, you can choose "Optimize Storage," so then only smaller pictures would be kept on the iPad. But if you've already done that, and you still want more space, disconnecting and deleting pictures will give it to you.
Well, that sounded a little complicated-- let us know how it goes...
You're right-- with Optimize checked, the Library on Macs, iPhones, and iPads, will replace full sized images with smaller ones "as needed." But it's hard to know when Photos thinks it's needed. There is lots of memory swapping with the disk drive, so the total storage doesn't tell you what the maximum use of the drive has been. So, the only way to be sure you have all full sized images is to check at the bottom of the Library view to see if Photos is finished with syncing after you've changed to "Download Originals"
This can be fairly fast, since it may not have dumped many full-sized images.
I swap the "System Library" often since I have several libraries. But I have only one of them--the one with only favorites-- that I connect to iCloud. I haven't seen any loss of pictures in swapping; pictures may add, but they don't seem to disappear. But I'm not sure if you make really major changes in the iPad just what will happen when you re-connect to iCloud. I think it's OK, but.... backup!
Thank you Richard! I misspoke- I realize that iCloud is just a sync service, and that is why I wanted to back up my library on a hard drive, as you do! As far as optimization, I do have it checked on the old iPad and newer iPhone, but it looks a little different on my much newer MacBook Pro.(See screengrab below) To me this implies that the full sized versions of my photo library are already on the Mac since I have more than half the internal hard drive available. Under storage on the Mac it says my photo library is 39GB while on the iPhone it is only 17GB. Do you concur? I would rather not have to redownload it all if its already there full size, but I will to be sure if need be. Also, as a side note, since I've disconnected the iPad from the cloud the optimized thumbnails are being gradually, magically placed into the "recently deleted" album where you get 30 days to get them back if you want (or you can mass delete from there). Someone in another thread on this forum said if I turn the iCloud connection back on later on the iPad it will delete all those images from the cloud as it syncs. Can this be true?
Will do, many thanks, Richard!
backing up iphoto library on external hard drive
