Selecting photos to store on iCloud

[mpainesyd (Michael Paine)]

I have just submitted this suggestion to Apple Feedback:

I would like to use iCloud Photos but do not want/need to save 125Gb of photos that are on my Mac to iCloud. It would be really useful if I could select photos to save to iCloud. This could work like music transferred from a Mac to an iPhone - the user can select albums to transfer.

Apple’s current “solution” is to buy more iCloud storage - no thank you!

This request is related to precautions during international travel:

"Cleaning" an iPhone for international travel

I see that the privacy declaration of QR Reader indicates it does not gather browsing history, which is promising. Also it has an NFC scanning feature, which could be useful, if combined with the option to confirm visiting a website. In my opinion it is too easy for a nefarious agent to trigger an NFC action on compatible smartphones. An NFC tag can be the size of a postage stamp (remember them!)

(but not the NFC issue)
While travelling my phone and iCloud account will only have photos that I have selected.

[dave1 (Dave K)]

Interesting idea.

I think the travel use case is the one that makes some sense to me.

And I get that people don’t want to pay for cloud storage. But the old model of select what to sync has played out. The result was that we often didn’t have on our mobile devices the content we were looking for; and selecting what to sync and trying to manage space was such a tedious chore.

So music and photos and the rest all sync everything, and manage space on the device with the “optimized” logic. But yes, it does imply that the cloud always has everything.

The latter also solves the “source of truth” problem, which is the cloud.

But I like this idea for trimming back what to take on the road. I was thinking of turning off my
entire iCloud Photos on my iPhone when I travel… then just turn it back on when I return.

[Shamino (David C.)]

@mpainesyd

I would like to use iCloud Photos but do not want/need to save 125Gb of photos that are on my Mac to iCloud.

You can create two libraries in Photos. Associate one with your iCloud account - it will be sync’ed. The other won’t be sync’ed. You can put all the pictures you don’t want to sync in there.

You can use Photos’ import mechanism to import photos from one library to the other.

So you can (for example), take photos with your phone, which will sync to iCloud and then to your Mac. Later on, you can launch Photos with your non-cloud library and import the pictures from the cloud library. Then launch Photos with the cloud-library and delete them, to free up cloud storage space.

It’s a bit of work, but it might let you do what you want.

[mpainesyd (Michael Paine)]

Yes - I have several photo libraries and so could take this complicated approach. I think it would be too easy to inadvertently sync the wrong library to iCloud (with Gb of data).

My simple need is to be able to select albums from the default library that are to be stored in iCloud.