I have 2 Mac notebooks. The older one is running out of hard drive space, and the newer has a 1TB hard drive and has many of my work-related movies. Those movies get downloaded to my older Mac, using up all of its hard drive space. How do I delete these movies from the older device while retaining them in iCloud and on my newer Mac?
iPhone 5s, iOS 7.0.3
Hi DDKMD,
Do you have a Time Machine backup of your older MacBook? If so, the movies that were downloaded should be backed up. But as a precaution, I would copy all of the movies from your old MacBook onto an external drive before making any changes.
Can you change the settings for your work related movies so that they are downloaded to the new MacBook or to the external drive in the future?
Once you have the files backed up, you can turn iCloud Photo Library off on your old MacBook Computer. The video files will still be available to your new MacBook Pro. Once iCloud Photo library is turned off on your old MacBook, you can delete the video files that you no longer want on that computer.
Get help with your iCloud Photo Library
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204570
How do I turn off iCloud Photo Library on just one device?
To turn off iCloud Photo Library for a single iOS device, go to Settings > iCloud > Photos and turn off iCloud Photo Library.
To turn off iCloud Photo Library for a single Mac, go to System Preferences > iCloud > Options next to Photos, then deselect iCloud Photo Library.
If you have Optimize Storage turned on, you might not have all of your original photos and videos on your device. To download the original photos and videos on your iOS device, go to Settings > iCloud > Photos and select Download and Keep Originals. On your Mac, open Photos, choose Photos > Preferences, then select Download Originals to this Mac. Then you can turn iCloud Photo Library off. You can also select the photos and videos that you want to download from iCloud.com.
iCloud Photo Library FAQ
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264
Take care,
This was very helpful. It is too bad that Apple would let you deselect only certain items so that you can pick and choose which you want to keep on your computer and which you would keep only in iCloud. Dropbox has this option, and it is extremely useful.
Deleting movies from iMovie
