Delete photos from MacBook Air M1, keep on other devices
My MacBook Air M1 8GB has run out of storage. Can I delete photos just from this one device while leaving them on other devices?
MacBook Air 15″, macOS 26.2
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Ramimur wrote: My MacBook Air M1 8GB has run out of storage. Can I delete photos just from this one device while leaving them on other devices?
If you are synchronizing your devices with iCloud Photos, then no. Synchronizing means keeping the same. When you engage iCloud Photos on a device, then the Library on that device is kept exactly the same as the iCloud Photos Library. So, for instance, if you take a picture with your iPhone, it is added to the iPhone's Photos Library, copied to iCloud Photos Library, and then copied to the Photos Library on each of the other devices that you have connected. If you delete a picture on your Mac, then that picture is deleted at iCloud and on all the other devices. The only way to have different pictures on a device is to disconnect it from iCloud Photos. And if you reconnect later, then Photos will again try to bring in all the pictures from iCloud Photos.
However, you can use Optimize Storage on the Mac. If you set a device to "Optimize Storage," then Photos may store only smaller images on the device and rely on iCloud to keep the full sized images. Having screen-sized images stored locally allows you to quickly scan through your pictures while saving lots of storage space. And, if Optimize is chosen, and you want to Edit a picture, Photos will reach out to iCloud to get a full sized image for you to work on. Your optimized Library may take up less than 20% of the space of a fully downloaded Library. But an optimized Library may be kept larger than that if the extra storage space is not needed.
Beware, though: backing up a Mac Photos Library with Optimize Storage only backs up smaller images. If you want to keep a true backup on an external disk for safe keeping, you need to have Download Originals checked. If you don't have room on the internal drive, you can use an external drive.
You should see this:
Backup iCloud Photos with an Optimized Mac
Keep in mind that you can't think of iCloud Photos as a backup service, since it backs up mistakes, and there's no way to undo them. Whatever you do with Photos on your device--accidents included-- it happens everywhere else. To preserve our precious pictures, we need a reliable backup.