Can Icloud backup iphone photos in one direction?

[whyrichard]

Dear Mac Community,

Please help me with my photos backup question.

I purchased icloud so that I could have my phone's photos backed up right away. However my desktop's photos library is larger than the 200gb plan, requiring the more expensive option.

QUESTION:
It is possible to have icloud only backup my phones photos to the cloud and back to my desktop, in one direction?

I do not need to have my desktop's entire photo library backed up using icloud (i am already using dropbox for that).

Thanks you for advice,
Richard

 

[Puonti]

Turn on ”Upload To My Photo Stream” on your iPhone and enable ”My Photo Stream” on your Mac.

 

[whyrichard]

Turn on ”Upload To My Photo Stream” on your iPhone and enable ”My Photo Stream” on your Mac.

It seems photo stream isn’t designed for easy saving if the photos:

Can I use My Photo Stream to back up my photos instead of iCloud Backup or iTunes?
No. Photos in My Photo Stream are saved on the iCloud server for 30 days. To save or back up these photos, you must save them from My Photo Stream to your iOS device. Here's how: On your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, open Photos and tap Albums > My Photo Stream > Select. Tap the photos that you want to save, then tap

> Save Image. Then you can back up your photos with iCloud or iTunes.

 

[Puonti]

Your original post was a bit confusing, but what I took away from it was that you don’t want to back up your photos to iCloud - you just want them to be uploaded automatically from your phone and downloaded automatically to your Mac. What I described will accomplish this, as long as you open Photos on your Mac every now and then so that it’s able to download new photos from your Photo Stream (which it will then keep copies of even past their expiration from Photo Stream).

If that’s not what you wanted, then I misunderstood you.