Photo Stream no longer working

[vjaaan]

Please help me solve this problem!

Photos I take on my iPhone 6 no longer are appearing in Photos on my MacBook Pro (new). I keep my photos on an external disc now and load that main system library from there when opening my Photos app on laptop. But for over a week, none of my new photos are showing up (as they are set to do in Settings).

Each time I used to attach my external drive and load Photos, the Photo Stream would update. That no longer happens.

Please help me learn what causes this and how I can fix it!

Thanks.

 

[vjaaan]

Well, I finally figured it out. Apparently my iCloud storage account got full, so it turned some things off. I purposely did not sign up for iCloud Photo Library because it dumps all photos back onto all my devices, and I do not want them all on my phone (optimized or otherwise). Yet I see where my phone is almost filled with photos that should not be there, and I suspect Google Photos has dumped them there (even though it was not supposed to).

But the alarming thing is, when I just upped my iCloud storage plan, I went to check my cloud settings on my computer again, and I see where they checked me to be using iCloud Photo Library!! Just by upping my storage plan, it signed me up for that without asking or telling me. What a mess that would have been. I quickly unchecked that box.

My screen looks like this (and I wondered why my photos has a minus sign instead of a checkmark, and when I clicked to change that, it checked me for the Photo Library thing again.)

I actually do not want all my photos stored in iCloud. I only want Photo Stream working. Is this even possible? And if anyone here knows about Google Photos, shouldn't there be a way to make sure they do not dump everything back onto my iPhone?

I plan to just delete most photos from my iPhone now, but I'll be careful not to delete recent things that need to still be in Photo Stream. I assume I can do this?

Thanks for any clarification on all this that you might have.