I have 20,000 old images on the Photos app on my iMac and I want to back them up to my iCloud so I can factory reset my computer. However I don’t want these images to sync to my current phone - which also uses iCloud to backup my current photos. Is there a way to upload all 20k images to iCloud but NOT have it sync to my iPhone? Thanks
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iMac 27″, macOS 15.3
You can only have one iCloud Photos Library for each Apple ID account.
To sync your Mac Photos to iCloud Photos, but not have them on your iPhone you would need an additional Apple Account and sec from a different user account on your Mac. It would be a lot of bother.
Why not copy your Photos Library to an external drive, before you restore your Mac to factory settings?
Why do you need to revert the Mac to Factory Settings? Do you want to downgrade the system? Then a copy of the Photos Library will not help, because you cannot open a Photos Library on an older system version and you have to sync the Photos Library to iCloud.
Oh that’s unfortunate! I have to factory reset because I need to sell it and want to make sure everything is wiped from it. By copying Photos library to an external drive, will I have to have an Apple product to be able to access the data in the future? Will my best bet be to drag all the photos and copy paste it into a normal folder, then back that folder up on a hard drive? Thanks for the help I’m a super noob with the tech.
Mac's Photos Libraries can only be read by Mac Photos. You can export your pictures from Mac Photos to an external drive, but you will lose some of the clever Apple information like the Face IDs, categories for searching, and the ability to revert edited pictures, for instance.
The best you can do is to use "File>Export>Export.20000.Photos" to get all your pictures with their edits, comments, and crops. And then use "File>Export>Export.Unmodified.Originals.for.20000.items" to get your un-edited, pre-cropped, and commentless versions. This will be 40,000 picture files, and it will take about twice as much storage as the Library does.
I wouldn't really export 20,000 pictures at once, I don't think-- If you get 90% through and then run into a corrupt file, it may take a while to figure out what happened.
Can I upload photos to iCloud without syncing to iPhone?
