If I create a shared album in Photos, and add photos to it, does it take up space on my device(s) or are all the photos stored in the cloud?
Can I then delete the original photo from my device(s) and still have the photos available in my shared album?
iPad (4th gen) Wi-Fi + Cellular (MM), iOS 8
As answwered in the very first post
Pictures in shared albums are uploaded to iCloud for the purposes of sharing, so you could delete them from the device and they would still be available. See this help page - iCloud Photo Sharing overview
LN
Thanks Brett,
I do have the photos backed up on a NAS, so not too worried.
Just want to clear some space on my phone, but still be able to look at my photos easily...
How about normal albums (rather than shared albums); are they stored only in the cloud or locally on my phone?
Cheese
Thanks Brett,
I understand (sort of!) how the iCloud Photo Library works, and that by selecting 'optimise storage' I can reduce the amount of space my photos take up on my device.
However, my question is - if I add photos to an album (from my device) and then delete the original photos from that device (and therefore from my iCloud Library), where is this album full of photos stored?
Is the album on my device or in the cloud?
Cheers
Thanks Brett,
So if I understand you correctly...
If I create a shared album on my iPhone of say 100 photos, those 100 photos will be stored twice on my iPhone, thus reducing my free space even further...
Thanks Brett,
To be honest I was hoping to avoid an expensive call to Apple; I had assumed this would be a simple question that someone on these support forums would be able to help me with.
Not to worry.
If there is anyone else out there who knows the answer to this it would be much appreciated...
Cheese a holic......a search brought me to this post of yours. I am new to the mac and need to know how to import my photos to the NAS. How did you do it? I honestly don't want to mess with the iCloud or PHOTOS on my MAC, I just want to go straight from the device to the NAS. HELP 🙂
snewsie wrote:
Cheese a holic......a search brought me to this post of yours. I am new to the mac and need to know how to import my photos to the NAS. How did you do it? I honestly don't want to mess with the iCloud or PHOTOS on my MAC, I just want to go straight from the device to the NAS. HELP 🙂
That is not possible - the Photos library can only be on a locally connected drive that is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) - it can not be on a NAS
You can backup the photos (not the library) by exporting to the NAS
LN
No idea if this is possible or not...
Personally I use Photos app on my Mac and just copy my photos onto my NAS every couple of weeks or so as a backup.
Not ideal, but iCloud seems fairly stable at keeping my photos so I'm not too worried.
I've enabled iCloud Photo Library on all my devices, so they're sort of backed up if I lose / break a device.
Still no-one has actually answered my original post - do shared albums actually take up space on my device...???
Hello Cheese, I was told in a recent call to Apple that shared album photos do not take up space on the devices of the people you share with, so I am assuming the shared album doesn't take up extra space on my devices as well and everything is linked to the cloud copy. I think that this makes sense because if you notice when you open Sharing there is an Activity view which shows all the pictures again and in a sequence of time added. This would make 3 copies if they weren't just linking the originals. Not sure I can prove my theory though.
Thanks Cheese,
I actually just tried that...I guess I will download into photos and then just export to NAS in batches. Thank you! And I also have the same issue with the shared photos. My husband dumps so many into that shared album I feel like it's clogging my device but evidently not. My iPhone says storage is almost full but I literally only have 30 photos on it but the photo storage shows 4g used by photos?
Thanks OT.
it was more in reference to my iOS devices (iPhone / iPad) which have more limited storage than my Mac.
if I create albums, and add my photos to the album, can I then delete the original copy, thus freeing up storage space on my phone?
Are the albums (and their photos) stored in the cloud or on my device?
So I can free up space on my device by adding photos to shared albums, then deleting the original?
But only, if you are satisfied with a reduced image quality.
The photos in the Shared albums have a reduced pixel size. You will want to save the high quality originals somewhere.
Thats great guys; thanks...
I'm already backing up to my NAS so I have full res images saved.
I just wanted a way I could reduce the size taken up by photos on my devices, while still retaining some photos on there...
Job done!
I just wanted a way I could reduce the size taken up by photos on my devices, while still retaining some photos on there...
that is iCloud Photo Library with optimized photos on devices with limited storage
LN
Yeah, I did try that Larry but still found my device was getting full. I regularly had to delete photos off my device if I wanted to add documents / music etc.
Shared library's will work much better...
I've never been able to figure out how shared photos are stored, one of my complaints with Photos. It is very confusing for large libraries on the storage, I have about 15 GB of photos on my device, many of which are in "shared library" I will try deleting the original out of the "all photos" and see what happens. I have the original stored in a conventional folder format, so I know I won't lose them.
Do shared albums take up space on my devices?
