Worst case, can’t you just turn off iCloud Photos in Settings > Photos? Obviously, then you won’t have photos on your iPhone, but if the space limitation was preventing you from using other stuff, it might be a worthwhile tradeoff.
Well, we have more than one iPhone really - one is 32Gb and one 64. Obviously it depends on the other stuff we keep in the phone, such as apps and music. I’m about to send a more comprehensive reply to Adam.
In practice nowadays a lot of my photos originate from the phone, so they have to start off there, as it were.
So to avoid overload, I need to switch off iCloud photos on the phone as you say - then the model looks like this:
- take a photo on the phone
- decide if it’s worth keeping (if not, it just gets deleted then and there)
- if worth keeping, is it worth keeping on the phone or elsewhere or both?
- if the decision includes “keep elsewhere” then I have to go through some kind of upload process. As far as I can see, the destination can only be iCloud photos if I upload the photos to my Mac and then import them into Photos there - there is no direct transfer to Photos via AirDrop for example. Bit of a mess really. Makes Google Photos look attractive, doesn’t it? Even DropBox might be as good a candidate for archiving one’s pictures.
Or have I somehow misunderstood the whole thing?
Thanks for the question. No, I’m not sure - but how would you know they were there if they were completely uploaded. There would have to be at least thumbnails left of the phone. I can ask Apple about this, I suppose.
Could take photos on the camera, and then attach phone to computer using cable. Then import to computer. e.g. with Image Capture app on macOS. And delete from phone after that.
Done this before, but not because of capacity reasons.
Optimise storage option on iOS has worked for me for this in the past.
You can turn on the upload to my photo stream option in settings, which would allow you to access the last 30 days of photos on a Mac connected to the same iCloud account, if using iTunes or image capture to sync to the computer is too bothersome. You can leave iCloud Photo Library turned on for the Mac and turn it off on the iPhone with poor storage - it’s not required that it be turned on for all devices.
I have a 64 GB iPhone and have no trouble at all with storage from photos with optimize storage turned on. My photo library is 51 GB on iCloud but takes only 3.8 GB on my iPhone at the moment.
Thanks - I will look at this some more as I am not familiar with the photo stream idea. I’m impressed the 51:3.5 ratio achieved by ‘optimisation’.
This is just personal, but I suppose instinctively I think of the phone as a satellite device to my main systems, and would only want to keep particular photos on it, rather as one used to keep family photos in one’s wallet to show friends, and maybe some photos of particular projects or celebrations - but not the last decades’ holiday photos, or the construction archive of the house refurbishment from fifteen years ago. The 20,000 plus-photos I’ve taken over the past few years are an archive really, and from my perspective to have them on the phone just seems like overkill.
I see that I’ve talked my way out of using iCloud Photos on the phone. Just have to streamline the method of safe archiving to the main library.
You might want to look at Photosync. It can transfer photos and video from almost anywhere to anywhere, and can be set up for some kinds of automatic transfers. (I think that needs the higher price premium version). I use it to back up the iThings photos to their own hierarchy on the mac for import to Aperture, and then I can export from Aperture to a folder that Photosync can put on an iThing directly to a new album. It has a long track record of goodness, Lifetime purchase or subscription.
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I use an app called Photosync. I think I heard about it here. I paid $3.99 for it. I see it’s now free but it you don’t upgrade to Pro at $5, it will only store low-res photos.
Buy the upgrade! It’s worth every penny.
It’s installed on my phone and I have it set to automatically stream to an iMac in my office when I connect to wifi. If it fails, I get a notification and can then manually start it.
The initial download took awhile. I am always afraid of something not copying over so I always check before I delete from the phone but to date it’s never missed on.
With this you don’t have to use the cloud or plug into a computer at all.
I see it in the app store as PhotoSync - transfer photos. Current version is 4.4.2
Good luck!
Diane
Thanks Diane and thanks Gastropod. Photosync sounds very promising and I will look into it straight away.
I should perhaps say for background that one of my Macs which should be sharing iCloud Photos with my laptop has been turned off for a couple of months due mostly to lockdown but also partly due to local internet problems (it’s in France and I’m in the UK). When (Oh When?) I can get back to France, the whole iCloud Photos thing will become worthwhile, even without the phone. So I don’t reject the facility as a whole, only in relation to the phone(s).
While I understand the instinct, I’d suggest that it’s based on another era’s scarcity, where there could be no way that an iPhone could hold all your photos. Now you’re in a situation of essentially artificial scarcity, where an iPhone could easily hold all your photos, but your particular one won’t due to everything else you have on there. While you have that particular phone, you may need to jump through hoops or stick with less than optimal solutions. When it comes time for your next phone, though, I’d encourage you to spend a little more to get the size that will let you stop thinking about all this. People shouldn’t waste their CPU cycles trying to micromanage a black box storage system like an iPhone—it’s just a bad use of human brains, especially since it’s not even possible to exercise full control.
And when I say I understand the instinct, I really mean it. Starting with the iPhone X and continuing with the iPhone 11 Pro, I forced myself to buy the 256 GB model because I needed more than the 64 GB model would provide without constant fussing and awareness of the space that I’d been suffering from with the iPhone 7. I was annoyed that Apple didn’t provide a 128 GB model in those phones, as it does now with the iPhone 12, but buying the extra storage was absolutely worth it, even though I only use about 80-90 GB. When I buy my next iPhone, it will definitely be a 128 GB model.
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When you replace a device with non-expandable storage, you should not only look at your current usage but project ahead over the anticipated lifetime on the new device. I know that when I upgrade, I usually try to purchase enough storage so that I am using no more than 50% of the storage in the new device.
Interestingly enough, after turning on full Photos syncing and also syncing Desktop and Documents, and even though my Photos library on my Mac is about 400 GB in size, the total used space on my iPhone X (with 256 GB storage) went down from about 125 GB to 82 GB. So it seems to be efficient as a syncing system.
That said, as I pointed out in my original post, sharing links works much better from Google Photos. So I use both.