Delete Photos Just Off iPhone, Not iCloud

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.

What I did was something a bit different...I emailed the photos from my iPhone to myself...put them on my desktop and then dragged them to a Photo album where I wanted those photos. Then I deleted them on my iPhone and those photos that I wanted to save were still there in the Photo album.

Saying something for "so long" doesn't make it true, no matter how long you say it for OR HOW LOUDLY YOU SAY IT.

iCloud Photos is designed for ease of use, to sync your photos across all devices. Just like iCloud Contacts syncs contacts across all devices, iCloud Calendars syncs Calendars across all devices, iCloud Notes syncs Notes across all devices, iCloud Reminders syncs Reminders across all devices, iCloud News syncs News preferences across all devices, iCloud Health syncs your health data across all devices, iCloud Keychain syncs your passwords across all devices, iCloud Safari syncs your Safari preferences across all devices. The model is 100% consistent.

What you want is for iCloud Photos to be the ONE exception to the iCloud syncing model. That would be inconsistent with the model.

There is NO WAY to both delete photos from iPhone and also save to iCloud, yet another example that demonstrates how fully incompetent the iCloud team is. Apple literally forces its users to go to their competitor. Amazon's photo-sharing app is perfect if one wants to store photos in the cloud and also delete from their iPhone.

You gave your permission when you agreed to iCloud's terms, but you failed to read and understand how iCloud works. Permission is not needed for iCloud to operate as advertised.

You can not delete any photo from the iCloud Photo Library without deleting the locally cached copies.

raponceu wrote:

Google Photos and (Amazon) Prime Photos are excellent choices,

So, just use Google or Amazon.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

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.

This is eactly, 100% how I feel. Cloud storage "should" take the burden off the user from having to store content on their device. It does not presently do that in any type of seamless fashion. Google is far more progressive than Apple in this realm. It feels like Apple is forcing its customers to pick up a new device every 1.5 years just to enjoy normal usage. It's a shame.

The only reason I bought extra icloud storage was precisely for this reason. I now have loads of EMPTY icloud storage but I am unable to send my photos to the cloud and delete them from the phone. If there is a way to do this, it is not very obvious as I have wasted hours trying to figure out how to keep photos in icloud storage as well as DELETE them to free up space o n my iPhone. Apple makes life simple in so many other ways. Why is this so complicated?

Since this still seems to be a fairly active post and in reading through the thread I'm still at a loss, here is my dilemma:

I LOST MY PHONE

My phone has said it's Offline since I lost it and I'm worried that clicking that Erase iPhone button on Find My iPhone is going to remove everything I have synced in the iCloud. Is it safe to assume, based off how the iCloud works that this would in fact be the result?

If so, what the **** am I supposed to do to protect my privacy on my lost phone AND keep my synced info?