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jmdeegan

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 17, 2007
96
1
I admit, I was one of those people who rarely deleted photos. my phone has photos from like the last five years.

well, earlier this week, I actually ran out of space. so, I backed things up locally on my computer, iCloud and google as well. and then when I went to delete the photo on my phone, it said if I delete it, it will be gone from icloud too. that confused me...I do not want to delete the icloud copy...but I do want to remove the photo from my phone.

right now, the phone has "optimize" selected, not download and keep originals. icloud sharing and my photo stream are off.

I googled, but the ones I read made it sound like this is hard or impossible, which seems odd to me. hoping someone here can lend some assistance.

thanks!
 
With "optimize" selected, your phone should only be storing low-res versions of your photos, in order to reclaim storage space. If your phone is still full, it is because you have too many movies, songs, etc.
 
i cleaned off a lot of everything....and i do have space now. but i have 5000 pictures, and i finally don't want them on there. but, i also don't want to lose my copies in iCloud either...but again, if i delete from iPhone, it deletes from iCloud too. unless i am missing something.

guess i should have been more clear. issue now isn't that i need space, per se. issue is, i want to delete the photo from the phone, but not icloud, and that seems to be an impossibility.
 
i cleaned off a lot of everything....and i do have space now. but i have 5000 pictures, and i finally don't want them on there. but, i also don't want to lose my copies in iCloud either...but again, if i delete from iPhone, it deletes from iCloud too. unless i am missing something.

guess i should have been more clear. issue now isn't that i need space, per se. issue is, i want to delete the photo from the phone, but not icloud, and that seems to be an impossibility.
I could be wrong, but I think I recall reading that it is not possible to keep photos on iCloud without at least keeping space-optimized versions on your device.
 
No, you cannot delete them from the device and leave them in the cloud. Apple has it setup so that your photo library will always sync across all your devices and the cloud. So, whatever is on iCloud is also on your iPad, iPhone and Mac. I rather like the way it's set up since I only have to delete it once from one location and it's gone everywhere. If you don't want all of those pictures out there, then the only solution is download them to local storage then delete them from the Photo Library.
 
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