I have used Image Capture many times and in my experience it does the trick just fine.
While I refuse to use iCloud Photos, I have used for many years Photo Stream. While not perfect, it does make getting a pic from my iPhone to my Mac about as easy as I could imagine.
âIs there a way to break the connection so I can delete thumbnail image clutter from my iPhone, leaving the the full resolution originals untouched?â
Fair question, but again, you need to think differently
If you delete the thumbnails, then what is left? Nothing.
I have a full 100,000 photos and videos in my iCloud Photo Library, consuming over 1TB. My âoptimizedâ copy on my iPhone is consuming almost 18GB. Yes, Iâd love to free up some of that space. But itâs not too large a fraction of my 64GB device. And at <2% the size of the actual library, the cost of these thumbnails is a fair tradeoff to being able to search decades of media.
EDIT: If I misunderstood and you would like to keep the originals on your phone and ditch the thumbnails, then that requires a discussion about indexing and performance. The only way you can browse all those pix without taking all day is because Apple has optimized the i/o by using thumbnails. So you canât turn that off, but you donât want to. Your storage solution will have to come from somewhere else. I could help more if I knew more details, such as what else is taking up space.
Okay but surely after you take a few photos you want to be able to review them, correct? You donât want them to just disappear to a place where you have to log into a computer to see, right?
So the question is how much should be stored locally? I just got back from a two week trip and probably took 1000 pix and certainly want them all handy.
And frankly, most people would be pissed and irritated at not being able to get access to their own pix at any time or place. My friends are constantly scrolling back to show me their kids as babies. So Apple has made a design choice thatâs in the overall best interest.
Again, I think weâre fighting the wrong battle here. Thumbnails are not likely your enemy. If you are out of space, something else should be evaluated.