iCloud Photo Library and storage space on ios device

[john991]

My question is if I have say 13gb of photos in iCloud photo library and on my iOS device I have say 6Gb of free storage. Does the photo's get downloaded and when I run out of space on the iOS device the photos will stop syncing with the device? Or do the photo's stay in iCloud photo library and don't use the device storage? As you can see, it will be easy for some people to run out of space on their iOS devices if they have a lot of photos.

 

[richwoodrocket]

The photos are stored in the cloud and downloaded as you access them.

 

[Trahearne]

My question is if I have say 13gb of photos in iCloud photo library and on my iOS device I have say 6Gb of free storage. Does the photo's get downloaded and when I run out of space on the iOS device the photos will stop syncing with the device? Or do the photo's stay in iCloud photo library and don't use the device storage? As you can see, it will be easy for some people to run out of space on their iOS devices if they have a lot of photos.

As long as you have enough storage, recent photos and videos that you access the most will stay on your device at full resolution.

There is no certain words on this yet as far as I have read. Look forward to seeing if there is beta tester who has given a test.

My speculation is that the Photos app for iOS does always store thumbnails, but caches recently accessed photos at full or optimized resolution, or even the full set if the storage is sufficient. So if your device starts to be tight in storage, the Photos.app will simply eject some cached entries and release the space, as iCloud already has the the original file at full resolution. In other words, the next time you access the ejected photos, it has to be reloaded from iCloud.

Edit: Someone has tried it, and Photos seems working in the way I speculated above.