Is there a way to delete photos from your phone that are backed up to iCloud without erasing them from the iCloud?

[macintoshjordan]

Does anyone know how to do this? I usually would sign out and then it removes all the photos from my phone but that no longer works because all my photos go back on my phone. I can delete them manually but my phone is 1TB as to where my iCloud Photos is well over that.

 

[StumpyBloke]

No, that’s the whole point of iCloud photos.

If it’s a storage issue, have you got optimise iPhone storage turned on for iCloud photos?

 

[macintoshjordan]

No, that’s the whole point of iCloud photos.

If it’s a storage issue, have you got optimise iPhone storage turned on for iCloud photos?

That is enabled but my phone is 80% full and I already pay for $30 a month of storage.

 

[BigMcGuire]

It'll start removing storage when you need it. Tho most of the devices I've had "optimized" storage turned on, despite my 150 GB+ of photos/videos - only kept about 7-11gb locally with Optimized Photo Storage turned on. How much is yours using?

 

[BigBlur]

It'll start removing storage when you need it. Tho most of the devices I've had "optimized" storage turned on, despite my 150 GB+ of photos/videos - only kept about 7-11gb locally with Optimized Photo Storage turned on. How much is yours using?

Same here. I have optimized storage turned on and my photos take up little space. My 55GB of photos in iCloud are only taking up 2.5GB on my iPhone.

That is enabled but my phone is 80% full and I already pay for $30 a month of storage.

What does Settings > General > iPhone Storage show as taking up space? Is it indeed all your photos?

 

[winxmac]

This is how I store my photos and videos.

I never enable iCloud Photos since whatever is deleted locally also gets deleted from iCloud.

I manually upload them to OneDrive since I have a Microsoft 365 subscription. Live Photos that are saved to OneDrive are still Live Photos when downloaded back to the iPhone or iPad. I don't know about Google Photos now since my previous Live Photos uploads are converted to just static photos.

I also manually AirDrop HEIC, and MOV from the iPhone to my MacBook Pro. For DNG and JPEG, I just use Send Anywhere to transfer wirelessly to my Windows computer. Once the photos and videos are saved, I copy them over to an external storage.