iCloud: Remove Photos from Mac Only

[someguy]

I'm sure this is answered somewhere already, but I can't seem to find a clear answer.

I've got a Mac and an iPhone using iCloud to sync photos, and I no longer want to sync or store any photos on my Mac. How can I safely remove them from the Mac without deleting them in iCloud.

I've gone into System Preferences -> iCloud and unchecked "Photos". Does that mean it's now safe to remove everything from within iPhoto on this Mac?

 

[someguy]

Hope it's okay to bump this after a day.

 

[someguy]

Trying this again. My hard drive is almost full, but I'm afraid to delete things in the Photos app for fear of losing them entirely. Some help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[someguy]

Just another bump!

 

[arkitect]

Just another bump!

Well, I think the reason no one has answered is because iCloud Photos syncing is a minefield. (Quite frankly all iCloud syncing is a bag of hurt.)

Erase on the Mac, and it vanishes from the iPhone… erase from the iPhone and it vanishes from the Mac…

I have found the only way to use it with peace of mind is to have backups of my Mac Photo library.

But I am following this thread to see if anyone comes up with a genuine solution.

Good luck!

 

[someguy]

Well, I think the reason no one has answered is because iCloud Photos syncing is a minefield.

I agree in the sense that if you don't understand how it works, you can easily delete something by mistake and have it disappear on all of your devices, but I think recovery from the Recently Deleted area is a reasonable method for fixing mistakes.

In this case, however, I'd be deleting many gigabytes worth of data and would be more comfortable confirming this particular bit of functionality first.

Maybe I should just call Apple.

 

[airlied]

Since you mentioned your hard drive become full, you have two options:

option one: as you have already done, uncheck photo in icloud panel. Then delete only ONE photo from your mac to see if it disappears from iphone. If it still exists on your iphone then you are ‘safe’ to remove the entire photo library.

option two: open photo.app on mac, go to this app’s preferences, there are two options ‘keep all original photos on mac’ and ‘optimize storage for mac’ . choose the second one. then you will find that your mac marks some hard drive area as purgeable, which means the data contains photo are still on the disk but if something else needs the space mac will clear it for them.

For option two, if you mac think the hard drive is too full it will delete some local photo data for you, but you won’t lose any on cloud.

 

[someguy]

option one: as you have already done, uncheck photo in icloud panel. Then delete only ONE photo from your mac to see if it disappears from iphone. If it still exists on your iphone then you are ‘safe’ to remove the entire photo library.

I did try this test already, and as far as I can tell, I should be safe to delete everything on the Mac. I guess I just wanted confirmation that this was the "correct" process to follow.

I'll give it a shot later today and report back. Thanks for the input.

 

[someguy]

Update: I just trashed the entire Photo Library file in ~/Pictures. Seemed safer than actually deleting from within the Photos app, since that could theoretically create a "delete" event that could find its way to iCloud and execute against my other devices. Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.

 

[airlied]

If you are dealing with any other cloud services I'd say your being paranoid. But we are talking about iCloud here......So you can't be too careful.