How do I delete photos from iPhone but not iCloud Photo Library?

With iCloud Photo Library any photos you delete from the phone will also be deleted from iCloud and from any other devices using iCloud Photo Library for the same Apple ID. The most you can do to reduce storage space required on the phone with iCloud Photo Library is to go to Settings > Photos & Camera and turn on Optimize Storage.

I believe you are correct FoxFifth. My question is why doesn't Apple let us take photos from our computer, and put them on iCloud, while simultaneously letting us free up space on our mobile device by deleting those same photos? Is this nothing more than an evil attempt to get us to throw away our old iOS device, and go buy a new one with more storage?

Perhaps there is some export capability on the mac photo software.

Get dropbox.com account. Download the dropbox app on your ipad and mac. All photos will be synced to your dropbox account. On the mac copy the photos to a non-dropbox folder. Delete photos on ipad, icloud, or mac. Be sure to backup photos that are only on your mac.

Robert

Adrian House wrote:

I believe you are correct FoxFifth. My question is why doesn't Apple let us take photos from our computer, and put them on iCloud, while simultaneously letting us free up space on our mobile device by deleting those same photos? Is this nothing more than an evil attempt to get us to throw away our old iOS device, and go buy a new one with more storage?

I doubt that is their intent, but it would be nice if there were more options with iCloud. You can make the suggestion to Apple at https://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html and meanwhile, as noted by rccharles, there are other options (a number of them) that do allow cloud-only storage.

They DO allow you to. You just have to take a few extra steps. What I do is I keep photos turned off in the iCloud section of my phone. When I plug my phone in to the computer, I upload all the pictures to the computer (into iPhoto which I vastly prefer). Then I manually upload them to iCloud. They are now on my MacBook and saved in iCloud storage until I remove them, but only the photos that are physically still on the phone are using up my phone storage space. I have photos going back to 2012 on iCloud. Of course I don't know how this works if the computer you're uploading the photos to is not a Mac.

Thank you for you clear instructions.