Storing Photos OFF iphone

TidBITS Talk
21

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.

22

I take you literally. Image capture has long been part of the apps the mac comes with. When you say copy to your mac, you mean into another folder.

Thanks for the scanning info. That I didn’t know. I use dropbox scan or other apps on my iPhone or the printer scanning software.

23

Thank you Doug re: copying to photo stream.

24

Thank you. I didn’t tell you all that this is for a 90-year old friend of mine. It must be simple.

25

“Is there a way to break the connection so I can delete thumbnail image clutter from my iPhone, leaving the the full resolution originals untouched?”

Fair question, but again, you need to think differently :slight_smile:

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 “optimized” copy on my iPhone is consuming almost 18GB. Yes, I’d love to free up some of that space. But it’s 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 can’t turn that off, but you don’t 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.

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26

I just use the camera as a camera, not interested in using it as a portable tool to access the most recent years of my entire photography collection.

“Think differently” seems to mean “give us all your stuff and use it our way.”

27

Okay but surely after you take a few photos you want to be able to review them, correct? You don’t 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 that’s in the overall best interest.

Again, I think we’re fighting the wrong battle here. Thumbnails are not likely your enemy. If you are out of space, something else should be evaluated.

Dave

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