Transferring photos from iPhone to iCloud to free memory.

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Level 1

4 points

Transferring photos from iPhone to iCloud to free memory.

My daughter's iPhone 6 Plus has 128 GB of memory. She has completely filled it with photos. I got her on her husband's iCloud account and we have elected iCloud on her phone and Optimize iPhone Storage. We also backed everything to the iCloud using iTunes on a PC. After all this she still only has 420MB of free memory on her phone. She is leaving a vacation tomorrow morning and wanted to obviously take a lot of pictures with her iPhone on her trip. How can we get some of the memory back now that their backed up to the iCloud? Apple support says Not to delete any pics from the iPhone or they're gone, the Apple Store says you have to delete them from the iPhone. We just don't know what to do! Your help is needed!

iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 9.2.1

Posted on May 2, 2016 9:03 PM

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Answer 1

Rysz

Level 8

44,391 points

May 2, 2016 9:17 PM in response to kaps77

Turn iCloud Photo Library off. Connect the iPhone to a computer, launch whatever app is used for photo management and IMPORT all photos from the device to the computer. Double-check that everything successfully imported. Only then, delete the images from the phone.

Background:

- iCloud Photo Library is a syncing service, not a backup service; that's why you need to import the images, at full resolution, to a computer.

- With a large Photos Library, it takes days, sometimes weeks, to upload, then sync, everything to iCloud; sounds like you just turned iCloud Photo Library on recently, so its unlikely everuything is in the cloud.

- An Optimized local library will free up storage space when needed, but that requires time and good internet connections; that's why I'm suggesting to delete manually.

- Manually, includes doing this via iTunes, which is much faster, but I'm not certain if you have everything set up for iTunes syncing.

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