iCloud photo questions..

[Matt-London]

I am running out of space on my iMac (320GB hard drive and only have 19GB free) so have signed up to iCloud in the hope of being able to free up about 50gb of space that my photos currently take up.
I have now completed the upload to icloud and I have selected the setting that stores the full size picture in the cloud and a low res one on my iMac to save space.

Question 1: When I check the hard drive space on my iMac it hasn't reduced as expected. Am I missing something?


Question 2: I have enabled icloud on my iPhone but can't see any of the photos from my iMac. I haven't switched on icloud photo library on my phone as I don't want to lose the high res pics on my phone. Is it possible to see the photos from my iMac without sharing the photos from my phone?

Thanks

 

[Mike Boreham]

I am running out of space on my iMac (320GB hard drive and only have 19GB free) so have signed up to iCloud in the hope of being able to free up about 50gb of space that my photos currently take up.
I have now completed the upload to icloud and I have selected the setting that stores the full size picture in the cloud and a low res one on my iMac to save space.

Question 1: When I check the hard drive space on my iMac it hasn't reduced as expected. Am I missing something?


Question 2: I have enabled icloud on my iPhone but can't see any of the photos from my iMac. I haven't switched on icloud photo library on my phone as I don't want to lose the high res pics on my phone. Is it possible to see the photos from my iMac without sharing the photos from my phone?

Thanks

Question 1: If you have already got the full size photos on your iMac, then changed the setting to 'optimised', it will (or used to in the early days of Photos) take a long time. People I discussed it with then were talking days and weeks. Also it will still keep full size on the iMac (or iPhone) if there is sufficient space. I don't think anyone knows what 'sufficient space' means. My advice is do it and be patient. I would be inclined to have an independent backup of the full size pics before committing everything to iCloud.

Question 2: Your iMac pics won't appear on your phone until you enable iCloud Photo library on the phone. The existing full size pics on the phone should be uploaded to the iCloud Photos Library and be merged with the ones from the iMac.

Replies above ignore Photostream which I have always kept turned off since turning on iCloud Photo Library.