How do I delete photos from my iPhone but not iCloud?

There are at least three services that do not have the shortcomings of Dropbox:

• Google Photos
• upthere.com
• shutterfly.com

All of them will upload your photos as soon as they are taken, organize them for you, and allow you to delete the photos from your phone without losing them. All of them support shared and private albums. Google Photos will also create albums on its own, create panoramas automatically if you have adjacent or overlapping photos, and create slide shows automatically. It will also show you albums on the anniversary of when they were taken ("Remember this date in 2003").

Upthere will also upload your music and documents to its cloud.

So iCloud stores all the originals and maintains copies of them on all your devices. I like this idea, but what I don't understand is, what is Apple's solution to the memory of an iPhone becoming exhausted when it's trying to maintain copies of thousands...tens of thousands of photos?

That's the phone owner's dilemma to solve. Not every phone owner has this issue.

Does one really need ongoing instant access to 1000's of photos? If so, you can reduce the storage required for your phone's photo library by about 90% when you enable optimization.

Full size photos on iCloud, device specific sized photos on your phone. This is managed dynamically by iCloud itself and is only implemented when required.

It is widely accepted that iCloud is not the product for everyone's needs. That will never be debated here. The common theme on the communities, and this thread in particular, is not every reads or asks questions.

Assumptions are made. Mistakes are made. Photos are deleted. Rants are delivered.

iCloud Photos is not the solution for large photo libraries. However, there are other services that are good solutions. The best is Google Photos; in addition to having unlimited storage (for a price, of course - I currently have 60 GB of photos in Google for $20 a year). It does a lot of automated organizing of photos, that on the whole works well. It creates panoramas when it finds adjacent photos, creates temporary albums of photos taken at the same time of year in years past, and a host of other features.

Another interesting option is upthere.com, which stores photos, videos and music. Both automatically upload as soon as the photo is taken. Upthere even has their own camera that goes directly to their cloud storage, skipping the phone entirely.

Dropbox has a photo service for their premium edition (~$100 a year for 1 TB). As does box.com. And there are the "traditional" photo management services, such as Shutterfly.

Thank you for the follow up and advice. My expectations for what Apple was doing with their cloud is far different from than Verizon. I have an iPhone for work and a Samsung for personal through Verizon. They offer a cloud service that can be managed from the laptop and phone. I can delete photos from my phone to save spacell but then open my gallery and chose Cloud to see them again.

I did purchase Dropbox and have begun to use it with my iPhone. I will be able to reduce

my appleasure cloud account and stop paying for service I thought they offered buto don't.

Again, thanks.

With Dropbox a shortcoming is that only one photo at a time can be selected for upload from within Photos. With iCloud, any number of photos can be selected and uploaded as a batch, but with Dropbox it's limited to one at a time. Maybe Apple did this to encourage users to upgrade to larger (paid) iCloud storage account instead of a non-Apple cloud storage company. If that's the intent, then it diminishes my opinion of Apple. That sort of throttling of user convenience runs against their reputation. Of course, I could open the Dropbox app and then select numerous photos to import as a batch, but it requires several more steps than uploading from within Photos.

If you enable iCloud Photos the images on your phone will always sync with iCloud and with any other devices that sync to iCloud. You can enable the Optimize function on the phone, which will reduce the memory occupied by the photos, but you cannot delete photos from your phone and keep them in the Photos app on another device. One kludgy alternative is to export the photos from the photos app on your computer to another photo management program, disable iCloud photos (which will remove them from your phone), then sync the ones you want back to the phone using iTunes. Another option is to use a 3rd party cloud storage solution; there are many. upthere.com is an excellent one that stores your images only in their cloud (and also your music, if you wish), and only shows them in the Upthere.com app. Another is Google Photos, which is really pretty amazing, as it organizes your photos in the background, creates panoramas when it can, creates slideshows automatically, and has a host of other features that Apple can't match. There's also dropbox.com, box.com, and shutterfly. And a few that I've forgotten.

That will solve the immediate problem. You then have to import photos to Mac Photo using a USB cable, rather than the automatic real time sync that iCloud Photos (or upthere or google photos) does.

Hi Liz, I don't believe storing your photos in iCloud alone is possible. I reckon you should forget iCloud storage and go for an external hard drive solution. You can have any number of libraries for different purposes. When you wish to add to your library, just hook up to your external drive and select which library you need to access. Needless to say, don't neglect to back up. Heres how to create new libraries.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.cultofmac.com/319457/how-to-create-entirely-sep arate-photo-libraries-in-photos/amp/?client=safari

This way you can travel between computers/ laptop and iMac. Its fairly straight forward, but a disappointment, as I can' see what the point of iCloud photo storage is, on the iPhone. Perhaps, Apple will make it worth the monthly fee, by enabling the storage of full resolution photos and videos, in iCloud only, so that we can free up space on all our devices.

Lemon Tart wrote:

This way you can travel between computers/ laptop and iMac. Its fairly straight forward, but a disappointment, as I can' see what the point of iCloud photo storage is, on the iPhone. Perhaps, Apple will make it worth the monthly fee, by enabling the storage of full resolution photos and videos, in iCloud only, so that we can free up space on all our devices.

There are many ways to do this, just not with iCloud Photos. For example:

• Google Photos - works really well on iOS. Keeps the photos in your Google Photos app in the cloud. Very powerful editing and organizing features, and some amazing automatic organizational features.
• upthere.com - Keeps both your photos and music in their cloud.
• Dropbox.com - Also stores photos and music
• Shutterfly.com - Photo storage and sharing.

Of these Google Photos is the real winner, but the others work well if you don't need or want Google's automatic organizational features.

Isn't the purpose of a cloud service to be able to pull items out and to the phone when needed and use the 1T storage to free up the phone? Rather than carry all the pictures from years past on the phone a person should be able to access the ICloud to pull out an old picture when needed. Why am I paying for a cloud service that is basically my phone? Another reason I am using Samsung for my personal phone and the company issued iphone for work. The shine continues to fade from the Apple.

Is there a way to delete photos from the phone but leave in the cloud and pull them out when needed?

shooterkiller wrote:

Isn't the purpose of a cloud service to be able to pull items out and to the phone when needed and use the 1T storage to free up the phone?

That's one of the many ways of using a cloud service. The more common way is to use the cloud service to replicate content across all connected devices, as iCloud does.

Is there a way to delete photos from the phone but leave in the cloud and pull them out when needed?

Yes, but not using iCloud. See my post directly above yours. It lists 4 ways of storing content only in the cloud and accessing it when needed. iCloud is designed to keep all content synced across all devices, so you always have access to it regardless of the device you are currently using, whether or not you have an Internet connection. Any other approach would prevent access if there was no connection. iCloud is thus intended for "intermittently connected" devices (that's the actual industry term). If you access a document on a device when it is not connected, it will sync and update when it is later connected. Many other systems work this way; Evernote, for example. Also Dropbox and box.com replicate content on each connected local device, if the device is a computer, but not if it's a mobile device.

The shine continues to fade from the Apple.

Because you didn't understand how iCloud works compared to other cloud services?