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Good morning all
Question on iCloud photos. Is it possible to only upload a selection of photos to iCloud or does it take literary every photo and push it out?
I have a number of images I use for desktop wallpaper that are not my own personally taken images that I don't particularly want across my photos on my IOS devices.
Is this possible, or is this a suggestion of a new feature to potentially include in future upgrades?
Thanks in advance for your time.
SH
Photos will upload each and every photo in your system library to iCloud. The purpose of iCloud Photo Library is to keep all libraries identical across your devices. If you want to have only a selection of Photos synced across your devices, move the photos you do not want to sync to a separate Photos Library. Only the system photo library will sync with iCloud.
See this Help page on how to manage more than one library: https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/pht6d60b524
A brute force way to keep Photos from syncing certain photos to iCloud would be to import the photos referenced and do not store them in your Photos Library. Referenced photos cannot upload to iCloud, see:
https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/pht1ed9b966d
But I cannot really recommend to risk this approach, because it is error prone. It is easy to make mistakes when working with referenced photos, see: Disadvantages of a Referenced Library in Photos | Communities
Photos will upload each and every photo in your system library to iCloud. The purpose of iCloud Photo Library is to keep all libraries identical across your devices. If you want to have only a selection of Photos synced across your devices, move the photos you do not want to sync to a separate Photos Library. Only the system photo library will sync with iCloud.
See this Help page on how to manage more than one library: https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/pht6d60b524
A brute force way to keep Photos from syncing certain photos to iCloud would be to import the photos referenced and do not store them in your Photos Library. Referenced photos cannot upload to iCloud, see:
https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/pht1ed9b966d
But I cannot really recommend to risk this approach, because it is error prone. It is easy to make mistakes when working with referenced photos, see: Disadvantages of a Referenced Library in Photos | Communities
Unfortunately this is what I also ran into. Ended up making two separate Photos library - one with about 3,500 photos that is our "system library" and synced through iCloud to all our iOS devices and my wife's iMac, one with my full library (around 75,000 photos) that is not synced.
Only "pain" is that when we take photos with our iPhones, I have to export them from that library and import them into the larger one. And when I take photos with my digital cameras, I have to do the reverse as they are first imported into the larger library.
An option is a program called PowerPhoto (from the Mac App Store) that helps managing multiple libraries - including moving photos from one to the other - among other tools. Tried the demo, but decided that since I really did not need the other tools (though they can be helpful) and I could move the photos back and forth with the import/export steps, the program was not worth the asking price of $25 to me. It might be to you. Several posters here swear by it.
Selective Photos to upload to iCloud
