iCloud Photos, help.

[actripxl]

I need help with a problem that I have been searching for an answer for quite some time that pertains to photos. I'm sure I'm not the only one to ask but I can't find an answer anywhere in the Apple support pages.

The basic issue is that I take a lot of photos and want them backed up to the cloud, so far this is ok. The thing I want to do is have them backed up to the cloud AND my iMac, I but want them off my iPhone and iPad to have more available storage. When I try to erase it says that it will be deleted from all devices which is not what I want.

This has been driving me nuts for a long time and the only thing I can think off is quit paying apple for iCloud and just use Amazon to store everything. I rather avoid this since I just rather have everything tied together on one ecosystem.

 

[Steve28]

With iCloud photos, you don't delete anything. The photos get uploaded to the cloud and your iPad/iPhone keeps whatever it can of them. If it needs space, it keeps a low rez phone screen image and dumps the high rez _until you need it_ at which point it's automatically retrieved from the cloud.

This process is completely automatic. The end result is it looks like you have every photo ever taken on any device...on all of your devices. While in reality apple is shuffling photos into and out of the cloud and only keeping a small portion on each device at any one time.

This is what happens when you have Settings->Photos&Camera-->optimize storage checked.