Family use case and "optimized storage" question

[Schtibbie]

So I have a maybe (?) unusual use case that Apple hasn't fully solved for and I guess my first question is whether they HAVE and i didn't get the memo. Second question has to do with behavior of "optimized storage" in iphone behavior.

1: We have a family iMac that is tied to my wife's icloud account that she also uses on her phone. We have all our apple devices (like iphones) in a "family" with her. Only HER phone synces photos automatically to icloud and to Photos on the mac, hence she never needs to plug in and upload photos and erase from her phone the old fashioned way. BUT I STILL NEED TO! Since i'm on my own appleid tied to family w/ her. Has this improved at all? What i do is: I plug my phone into the family imac, open Photos, and upload. THEN, I go and manually select and delete all the photos off my phone. PITA.

2: Related to #1: my phone has "optimize storage" turned on for photos, meaning it stores a lower quality version on-phone. So when I do my upload mentioned in #1 above, am I accidentally uploading crap quality photos to our iMac, or is it smart enough to pull down from "my" cloud the full quality ones and put them on our imac in Photos?

3: Why is this so complicated?

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

1. If you all have a family iCloud account, then you all will sync to individual iCloud libraries (by AppleID). From there, you can elect to share your content with other people in the family. This, honestly, is preferred for me, since not every picture I have in Photos is worth sharing.

2. iCloud will upload the original image. Once the full image is uploaded to iCloud, the iPhone will make a smaller version of that image to save space and clear the full-res image. However, should you even need the full res image, just zoom in on it, and the iPhone will pull down the full version of the file from iCloud.

3. It's not complicated at all, really. Just enable iCloud Photo Library and it's pretty seamless. Enable Optimize Storage on devices where space is limited. Share the content you want via Shared Albums. Delete only the photos you don't want to keep. At least this is how I do it.