Q: Will migrating DropBox photos into iCloud Drive also push them into my Photos app?
My phone storage is 64gb. My MacBook Pro has around 100gb of available memory left. My DropBox account has around 100gb of "stuff" which does include about 85gb of pictures.
If I migrate the photos into iCloud Drive (assuming I buy 1TB), will they automatically show up in the Photos.app? I can't have 85gb of pictures sync across my devices, how should this best be handled. I like managing, editing, and having access to all the pics, but with the photos.app I am concerned that I can only store in the photos.app what my iOS devices can hold with regard to memory.
TIA
-Jason
Posted on Sep 21, 2015 5:21 AM
When you store photos on iCloud Drive, they will not be added to iCloud Photo Library. iCloud Photo Library is independent of iCloud Drive. But the photos are not easy to browse on iCloud Drive. They will only show generic icons, and so you will have to open each photo to see it. And all photos you add to iCloud Drive will also have local shadow copies on your Mac for offline access, if you enable iCloud Drive on your Mac. So you do not save any storage by using iCloud Drive.
See: iCloud Drive FAQ
The Photos.app is more convenient. You can store all original photos in iCloud and browse the photos using the Photos.app. If you enable "Optimize Storage" on your iPhone or other iOS devices, you can save storage. The original photos will be in iCloud, but only smaller, optimized versions will be on your iOS devices. It should be no problem to store the optimized versions of 100GB photos on iOS devices with not much storage. You can also enable "Optimize Mac Storage" and keep the originals for the Mac Photos Library in iCloud. But you will need an internet connection to edit the photos, if you use "Optimize".
Posted on Sep 21, 2015 6:03 AM