Delete Photos Just Off iPhone, Not iCloud

It remains the fact that icloud is an incomplete, dumb and brutish syncing service. Mighty Apple should be able to offer some additional features like the possibility to delete photos on one device without touching those in the cloud. They are almost 1 trillion worth, for chrissakes.

Given that iCloud photo sync simply does not work the way that Apple says it does, the best option is to:

1. Turn it off on your phone
2. Take photos on your phone
3. Plug your phone into your mac
4. Copy all the photos to your mac using the Photos app
5. Disconnect your phone
6. Delete the photos on your phone to free up storage.
7. Hope that one day Apple will fix iCloud so that files actually transfer, or their absurd "optimise storage" begins working in a sensible way.

At the risk of wasting my time responding to silly answers to threads that are 6 months old, I do so, so that others may avoid losing photos because of this nonsense.

When you save photos to a shared album they are saved at a reduced resolution, so if you decide to delete all the photos from your library and rely on the copy in the shared album you won't have the original copy and you may not be able to use the photo for whatever you wanted to do with it because it is of too low a quality.

Its 2017. I need an easy way make space on my iPhone without having to connect to the laptop, where space is also at a premium. I naively assumed iCloud was that way: keep everything in the cloud and call from any device. But iCloud forces you to keep photos on the phone to keep them in the cloud. This defeats the whole purpose of having infinite storage on the cloud. It's disappointing that Apple hasn't solved this obvious problem forcing users to depend on third party solutions.

Feedback for Apple goes here >>> http://www.apple.com/feedback/

I've submitted to this hundreds of times. Bugs mostly, for all their software that doesn't work like they say it does - you know, iCloud, the App Store, Siri, and so on. Pretty sure it submits whatever you type in into a black hole, since years go by and the same dumb bugs are still there.

Google photos actually asks me if I want to delete photos from my iPhone and free up space,

What they don't ask however is "Can we use your photos for any other purpose we wish without compensation to you or your knowledge?" Nothing is free. If you feel their feature set is best for you by all means use it.

https://www.google.com/policies/terms/

Apple should be able to offer some additional features like the possibility to delete photos on one device without touching those in the cloud.

But it doesn't at this moment.

They are almost 1 trillion worth, for chrissakes.

How is this in any way relevant to the features of their offerings?

Nobody here disputes your point that a feature you want is missing. This is simply not the place to bemoan it. This community is for technical assistance, not an agent for change.

Feedback for Apple goes here >>> http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem or a suggestion for change. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem/suggested change solved sooner.

Feedback

"Keep every last shot" implies that you can keep a lifetime's worth of photos. Obviously, if you eventually top out, but can't delete from your phone without also deleting from the cloud, well... you *cannot* "keep every last shot." Just saying'...

I naively assumed iCloud was that way: keep everything in the cloud and call from any device.

True dat.

But iCloud forces you to keep photos on the phone to keep them in the cloud.

It's not really forced on you if that's the way it's designed. Using iCloud is a choice you made. How on earth were you forced in to that choice ?

It's disappointing that Apple hasn't solved this obvious problem forcing users to depend on third party solutions.

There is no problem to solve. iCloud is NOT off device storage and has never claimed to be. It is a syncing service. Multiple copies of your content in multiple places, all synced in near real time.

You can use a 3rd party option by choice.

Well....that's partially true. But....

When you go to your iPhone Settings>iCloud>Photos you'll have three options:

iCloud Library: super lazy mode

New photos: lazy mode

Shared Albums: diligent mode

So... the response you got above is true for Super Lazy mode (and I assume for lazy mode too, since I haven't used it). But if you use the Shared Albums mode you can actually create albums in your iCloud and fill them with photos/videos that will remain in the cloud even if you delete them from your device. You don't even have to share the albums, just create and fill them.

In the spirit of not being lazy, you can use ANY of the three modes and then go to your Mac and DOWNLOAD your content locally. It will also remain on your local hard drive even if you delete it from your iPhone.

If you're desperate and feed up with the cloud, you can plug your iPhone into your computer open Photos, iPhoto, Image Capture (or whatever they have now on those Windows thingys these days... if you use that) and import your content as if it was a digital camera. Then you can delete it from your iPhone and guess what... It will remain in your computer.

But the clue is stop being lazy.... and I speak for all of us.

techgeekguru wrote:

I totally agree with you. What is the point of having an icloud storage if I cannot delete the pics from my phone to save space and still have to keep them??? it defeats the whole purpose of icloud. Apple needs to find a feasible solution to this problem.

The purpose of iCloud is to keep all your photos in sync across all of your devices. It is not designed to be simple storage. You might wish that Apple had made a different choice but they didn't. If you want cloud storage that will allow you to delete the photos from your device but keep the store on the cloud servers, consider Google Photo.

You can also submit your feedback to Apple here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Here is the best way that I've found:

1. Connect iPhone to mac
2. Use iTunes to make a local backup of the iPhone.
3. Import all pictures and video from the phone into the Photos application
4. Launch the Image Capture application and use it to delete photos and videos from the iPhone.

After that, the pictures will appear in your photo stream and remain on your mac, but will not be taking up space on your phone. I have found that I have to do this process on both my phone and my wife's phone every month or so to ensure the size of the iPhone backup are small enough to fit on our iCloud accounts.

lohmdj1 wrote:

And what if you already have photos on the phone that you want to save, but want to take off the phone to make room for more?

Stop using iPhoto (cloud) Library and use one of the other cloud storage/backup options. (e.g., I use Box.)

Copy your photos to a thumb drive or external HD.

Not at all, what remains fact is that you are expect something to do something it was never intended to do, it's like going to the supermarket and buying a pound of ground beef to make a key lime pie.