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Delete photos from iCloud Photo library after manual import to Mac

Hi,

I had 12000 photos in my camera roll and I was running out of space on my 50gb iCloud plan, so I decided to remove 5000 old photos from my phone. Since it would take forever to on the phone itself, I used Image Capture to import the photos. However, Image Capture can't delete photos while iCloud Photo Library is turned on, so I temporarily turned that feature off. Now I've deleted photos so I'm down to 7000 and 13gb lighter. However, when I turned iCloud Photo Library on again I realised that I was stuck in a sort of limbo.

iCloud Photo Library still keeps my deleted photos (the 5000) in the library and doesn't acknowledge that they've been deleted. So my iPhone has the freed up space but iCloud doesn't. I tried turning photos off in iCloud and deleting the data, which freed up the space, but it put my on a 30 day waiting period (something like "if you regret this choice you have 30 days to change your mind"). I don't want 30 days, I want to delete my iCloud photo library now and reupload it with only the photos I want to keep, to get rid of the already imported 5000 ones. Or get iCloud to delete the deleted photos too, without reuploading.


Has anyone figured out a way to get around this?
Or do I have to wait 30 days before I can start using iCloud Photo Library again?

Posted on Mar 29, 2018 3:51 AM

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Delete photos from iCloud Photo library after manual import to Mac

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