Moving photos from iCloud to iPhone. Not restore

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Moving photos from iCloud to iPhone. Not restore

I’ve seen a lot of old questions regarding this but not a definitive answer and maybe things have changed over the updates.

I’ve wiped my iPhone due to software issues and setup as a new phone (same IDs of course) and not restored as I don’t want to risk wiping it and restoring the possible corruption back to it. My photos and videos are all backed up on iCloud. After setting up the phone, I see the icons for the pictures, in the Photo app, are little clouds until they are all processed and then I see the small image of the picture.

Question: Has my phone downloaded all these images from iCloud or is it showing me an icon for it and the image is only in iCloud or has it copied it back to my device? I’m suspecting the former.

What I’d like to achieve is what I had before the wiping of the phone, my images on my phone and a backup of them in iCloud.

Can this be achieved or do I have to resort to finding a 3^rd party tool that can do this?

Thanks

iPhone 5s, iOS 7.0.2

Posted on Feb 8, 2016 2:47 PM

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Answer 1

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Winston Churchill

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Feb 8, 2016 3:01 PM in response to Plentymech

Is settings > photos and camera > optimised checked or not.

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Answer 2

Plentymech Author

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Feb 8, 2016 6:44 PM in response to Winston Churchill

Optimised, which is why I suspect I just have pointers to the image only held in iCloud.

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Answer 3

Feb 9, 2016 1:54 AM in response to Plentymech

Then that's correct, you potentially don't have a full resolution copy on your device. To do that you would need to check 'download originals' which you can only do if you have enough room.

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Answer 4

Plentymech Author

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Feb 9, 2016 2:56 PM in response to Winston Churchill

So I do have an actual copy of the image, albeit a reduced resolution one, on my iphone opposed to a link to the file in iCloud. I suppose an easy way to have tested this would be to try to open an image in airplane mode and see if the image opened.

Crossing the streams a bit here, I've noticed also that my notes are selected to backup to iCloud but when I view iCloud via a browser, it shows no notes at all. Anyone seen this behavior before?

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Answer 5

Eric Root

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684,039 points

Feb 9, 2016 4:22 PM in response to Plentymech

Try Settings/iCloud and slide off syncing. Wait a few minutes and then resync.

Have you tried signing out of iCloud and then sign back in?

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Answer 6

Plentymech Author

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Feb 9, 2016 4:42 PM in response to Eric Root

>>Try Settings/iCloud and slide off syncing. Wait a few minutes and then resync.

Thats what I thought I'd try but when sliding it off, it tells me it'll delete all my notes on my iPhone, sort of the opposite of what I'm trying to achieve :-)

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Answer 7

Feb 10, 2016 12:38 AM in response to Plentymech

Plentymech wrote:

So I do have an actual copy of the image, albeit a reduced resolution one, on my iphone opposed to a link to the file in iCloud. I suppose an easy way to have tested this would be to try to open an image in airplane mode and see if the image opened.

No, you would need to check 'download originals'

Crossing the streams a bit here, I've noticed also that my notes are selected to backup to iCloud but when I view iCloud via a browser, it shows no notes at all. Anyone seen this behavior before?

I assume you mean sync your notes rather than back them up.

First check that all your settings are correct, that notes syncing is checked on all devices (system preferences > iCloud on a mac and settings > iCloud on a iPhone, iPad or iPod).
Make sure the notes you are adding are added to your 'iCloud' group and not an 'On My Mac', 'On My Phone' or other non iCloud group (you can do this by checking in groups), non iCloud notes will not sync.
If you are sure that everything is set up correctly and your notes are in the iCloud group, you might try unchecking notes syncing in the iCloud settings, restarting your device and then re-enabling notes syncing.
You might also try signing out of your iCloud account completely, restarting the device and then signing back in again.

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