Simpsomatt
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: Select albums to store in iCloud Library?

I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this question, so maybe it's more of a rant than a question.

 

But, is it possible to activate iCloud Photo Library, but only use it for selected albums instead of the entire Photos library?

 

I have a lot of old photos on my Mac.  I have no need to share them or see them on my iPhone  I have way more disk space on my Mac than I'll ever use, so there's no need to "save space on my device" by moving them to the cloud.  Everything is backed up via Time Machine on an external disk.  I do not want to pay for the iCloud storage to hold them, or the bandwidth to upload/download them (I"m on a limited broadband plan).  But I would like to keep some more current and interesting photos on my iPhone and iPad, and iCloud photo library would be a good way to do this if I could select a few albums to move to iCloud and leave the others on my Mac.  As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't think this is a reasonable desire, because they don't seem to offer any way to implement it.

Does anybody have any suggestions on how to accomplish this?

 

I suppose I could move all the old uninteresting pictures out of Photos and just keep them in folders.  But that seems to defeat the purpose of having an organizational tool like Photos.  It would be nice if Photos had a little more flexibility.

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Nov 1, 2015 7:07 AM

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Simpsomatt

Q: Select albums to store in iCloud Library?

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  • by markwmsn,

    markwmsn markwmsn Nov 1, 2015 10:27 PM in response to Simpsomatt
    Level 5 (5,669 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Nov 1, 2015 10:27 PM in response to Simpsomatt

    I don't know of a feature that does exactly what you want, but here are a couple of approaches people have taken to similar problems:

     

    * You could keep two Photos libraries on your Mac: a large one with all of your pictures and a smaller one with the ones you want to share to your iPhone and iPad. Make the smaller one the System Photo Library so that it syncs to iCloud Photo Library and thence to your iDevices. The downside is that Photos has no tools to handle multiple libraries at the same time, so copying a picture from the large library to the small one is a manual export-import function.

     

    * You could use iCloud Photo Sharing shared albums (formerly called Shared Photo Streams) with no sharing partners. One downside is that pictures in a Shared Album are always shown in the order they are added to the album. (In other words, they are still streams.) There are also hourly, daily, and total limits to the number of pictures in iCloud Photo Sharing (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299).

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Nov 1, 2015 10:41 PM in response to Simpsomatt
    Level 10 (107,785 points)
    iCloud
    Nov 1, 2015 10:41 PM in response to Simpsomatt

    As markwmsn said: Use multiple Photos Libraries, one for iClod and one for all other photos. Or use Shared albums.

     

    Just an odd-on:

    • This Help page explains how to use more than on Photos Library:  https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/?lang=en#/pht6d60b524.  If you split your library, consider to invest in PowerPhotos. Fat Cat Software – PowerPhotos
      This neat tool lets you browse multiple Photos libraries without having to open the libraries in iPhotos. there is one big drawback of having a separate iCloud Library.  Only the System Photo Library can be enabled for iCloud and can be seen by other applications in the Media Browser.
      So your iCloud Photo Library need to contain at least all photos you want to be able to access using the Media Browser from Mail, Pages, etc.
    • The Photos in the Shared albums may have a reduces Pixel Size, if your original photos are very large.