How exactly does Photos and iCloud backups work? (including Deleting photos)

[thephantompain]

I have iCloud Backup and Photos turned on. If I delete Photos from my Photo app, it ALSO gets deleted from my iCloud. What happens if your Phone storage is full and you want to 'offload' the storage to iCloud, and delete your photos - this will delete all your Photos already backed up to the iCloud, right?

I'm looking at the iCloud settings on my iPhone 13 Pro Max and it's set to 'Optimise iPhone Storage' which is nice, but I don't think this 'solves' the problem. Do you really have to wait until your device is full so that Apple will replace the photos with 'device-sized versions'?

Thinking of the future, what happens to your backed up Photos if you own a 128GB model now, transfer it to a bigger model, like a 512GB model, then on your new 512GB model phone, delete all the photos to free up more space - will those also disappear from your iCloud?

Appreciate your input

 

[now i see it]

Anything that’s already on iCloud (keychain, contacts, messages, notes, iWork documents, calendar, etc) doesn’t get backed up to iCloud when you do an iCloud backup- since it’s already on iCloud servers.

Yes, when your photos are linked to iCloud photos, whatever picture you delete on your phone gets deleted permanently on iCloud too.

iCloud Photos service isn’t a repository for images in the sense like a web server is. It’s a linked service.

If you wanted to unload all your pictures off your phone to be stored on iCloud or somewhere else, don’t use iCloud photos. Disable iCloud Photos and upload them bit by bit via the Files App to iCloud Drive. (Which is a tedious and miserable experience).
Either that or offload your pictures to a Mac or use a different service like DropBox

 

[thephantompain]

Anything that’s already on iCloud (keychain, contacts, messages, notes, iWork documents, calendar, etc) doesn’t get backed up to iCloud when you do an iCloud backup- since it’s already on iCloud servers.

Yes, when your photos are linked to iCloud photos, whatever picture you delete on your phone gets deleted permanently on iCloud too.

iCloud Photos service isn’t a repository for images in the sense like a web server is. It’s a linked service.

If you wanted to unload all your pictures off your phone to be stored on iCloud or somewhere else, don’t use iCloud photos. Disable iCloud Photos and upload them bit by bit via the Files App to iCloud Drive. (Which is a tedious and miserable experience).
Either that or offload your pictures to a Mac or use a different service like DropBox

Thanks. I think I could just manually export them to PC and back those up in a hard-drive.
It's a shame Apple didn't just use it as a image backup service in a way like how DropBox and other similar services work. Would have been good to have a similar service within the ecosystem, to be honest.

How do you back your photos up, if I may ask? Would you recommend Dropbox?

 

[now i see it]

How do you back your photos up, if I may ask? Would you recommend Dropbox?

I don’t use Dropbox for anything.
I used to back up my phone a long time ago to iCloud but I don’t do that anymore.
I’ve got a Mac so I back up the whole phone to that. It’s sooooo much faster than using iCloud.
In the backup there’s the pictures.

Every once in a while (once a year) I’ll copy all my photos over to my Mac using File Sharing, but I’ve gotten lazy doing that. None of my pictures are priceless, so if I lost them all it wouldn’t really matter to me. I don’t like keeping old pictures forever.

 

[MBAir2010]

is there a way to delete photos iCloud automatically stored while upgrading to catalina?
"The photos and videos that you delete on one device are deleted everywhere that you use iCloud Photos. Photos and videos stay in the Recently Deleted folder for 30 days before they're deleted permanently."
do i need to wait 14 more day?
physically deleting them is not working via iCloud-com on a MacBook air Mojave