Question about Photos on Mac

So, you are able to create multiple photo libraries on your Mac and then select which one you want to sync with all your other devices.

If you hold down the option key before clicking on the Photos app on your phone you have the option to create a new library. You can create as many libraries as you want and each one is self contained. For example, you could if you wanted, create a library with all of your photos from 2024, 2023, etc.

For the library containing the photos that you want to sync to your phone, iPad, etc, open this library on your Mac, open settings (press CMD ,) select the iCloud tab and click iCloud Photos. This will upload all of your photos from that library on your Mac to iCloud (and download to your devices) and also download all of the photos already in the cloud down to your Mac.

I wouldn't worry about the photos taking up too much space on your phone, if you open settings on your phone and in the photos menu select optimise then the phone will only download thumbnails of the photos which are very small file sizes.

(From a backup point of view though make sure you select 'download originals' on your Mac and keep separate backup copies).

Arwen4CJ wrote: ... my hope was that the pictures could be deleted off my iPhone and iPad so that they wouldn’t take up space on those devices.

Hold up! I'm worried about this! The thing is, iCloud Photos is a synchronization service, not an off-device storage place. When a device is synced with iCloud Photos, then Photos keeps the pictures in iCloud exactly the same as the pictures on the device. If you connect to iCloud and then delete pictures on your phone, then those pictures will also be deleted at iCloud and every other device that's synced to iCloud Photos. The same goes for your Mac or iPad or whatever is synced.

Have you "synced" pictures from your Mac to iPhone using a cable? If you have, those pictures will be lost on the phone, because "syncing" by cable and syncing by iCloud are incompatible.

If you have different pictures on Mac Photos and on iPhone Photos, and then you connect iCloud Photos, then all the pictures will be transferred from both to iCloud, duplicates will be rejected, and then all missing pictures will be copied to the devices-- so their Photos Library have exactly the same pictures, and you don't lose any.

As Russ New Boy suggests, a good way to save storage space on an iPhone or iPad is to choose "Optimize Storage" in Settings>Photos. This will keep all the pictures on the phone, but in a smaller size more appropriate for the smaller screen. You can save as much as 90% of Photos storage that way. And if you need to zoom in or edit, Photos will grab the full sized image from iCloud for you to work on.

If you must, you can choose "Optimize" in Photos>Settings>iCloud on the Mac, as well. The only real disadvantage to choosing "Optimize" on a Mac is that you can't really make a backup of Photos, because the full sized images may not actually be on the computer. Many people use an external drive if their Macs don't have enough room.

You can split a Library into smaller Libraries on a Mac, but only the System Library can be connected to iCloud. If you need more guidance for doing that, just ask.

Let us know if this makes sense-- we don't want you to lose anything!

Thanks Richard. Yes it can never be emphasised enough that iCloud is just a sync service.

I think it is vital Arwen that you maintain a version of your library on your Mac that has download originals selected and you keep a back-up of this library. As good as iCloud is I have had a couple of weird things happen to my library in the past which, if I hadn't had a library back up would have meant losing photos or hours of editing.

FWIW I keep a back up of my library AND export the modified version of my photos that I keep backed up in various ways so even if I lost my library or it got corrupted I would still have a separate folder containing the jpgs.

Given you have bought extra iCloud storage you could keep all your photos in one library and with optimise storage set on the iPhone they would take up very little space.