Wife and I both have 64GB iPhone 6 and share an iTunes/iCloud account. For a few years now we've been using iCloud for a convenient photo storage solution. Pre-iCloud photos are safe on an external hard drive. Just upped from the 50GB plan to 200GB. The iCloud storage itself is not the issue. My phone is down to 6GB of available space. I have 49 used GB, 21 of which are photos/videos. My issue is that I cannot remove these photos/videos locally from iPhone without also removing it from iCloud. I realize iCloud is a "syncing" solution more than "backup" but I see my device storage continue to shrink and I'd like an easy solution. As an Amazon Prime member, I have unlimited photo storage with them. I could backup everything to there via iOS app and desktop and then purge iCloud. Does anyone use Prime Photos? Anyone with any suggestions?
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Photo Storage Solution
- Thread starter twobelowpar
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I can't comment on Prime Photos. OneDrive has been great for me. Love the versatility of it, and being able to access it on my phone, or anywhere.
False.
The "free" Google photos reduce the quality of all your photos, even the ones that are 16MP or lower. And they are reduced significantly. I have a 16MP JPEG that was originally a few megabytes, when I put it in Google drive, it became just a few hundred kilobytes.
So no, unless you don't care about archiving your photos.
Want the better solution? Flickr, free 1TB, no reduction in quality.
Not in my case, the photos taken from my iPhone are typically ~2MB in size, and the size remained unchanged after backed up to the free option of Google Photo.
I like(d) having a local copy of them myself. Might be something to look into.You can't even tell the difference on your phone between google photos and your iPhone.
Look, I'm all for having high quality pics but you're acting as if they're taking my 12MP pic and turning it into something taken by a potato
For Google Photos you can opt into the full quality option, I never do the unlimited. If it fills up it's only $1.99 per month for 100GB on top of your 15+GB. I have 19GB as they give 2GB yearly for doing a security settings checkup. But as the above poster said for 12MP photos you probably won't see much difference, there have been a few articles comparing unlimited vs full picture quality and the difference is very minute.
You can also use OneDrive assuming you opted in to keep your free 15-30GB option after the 5GB change blowback. I have a 130GB of space on that, which drops to 30GB after 2 years for me.
Blaine, a NAS is probably better than a single Drive for backup. If it kicks the bucket... I have a copy of my photos on my Netgear NAS as well as Google Photos.
You can also use OneDrive assuming you opted in to keep your free 15-30GB option after the 5GB change blowback. I have a 130GB of space on that, which drops to 30GB after 2 years for me.
Blaine, a NAS is probably better than a single Drive for backup. If it kicks the bucket... I have a copy of my photos on my Netgear NAS as well as Google Photos.
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21gb sounds a lot. Do you have optimise photo storage turned on (Settings > photos & camera > optimise iPhone storage)? If you do that it will leave the full-quality photos in iCloud but remove most of them from the phone in favour of iPhone-optimised thumbnails & download the full-res versions of any you decide to edit or that you favourite. It should also intelligently alter the amount of photos it's keeping locally based on your free space so you never fill up all your storage. If you've already got that on then ignore me, you must take a lot of photos!
I do have them optimized, and we do take a lot of photos! Mostly my wife, who will take a dozen of one particular shot and not delete the 9-10 that aren't needed. There are 11,000 and another 400+ videos (mostly under a minute but still..) We probably have just as many on the external harddrive from the pre-iCloud days.
I guess my main concern was running out of iPhone storage but obviously still having iCloud storage (200gb). If iPhone is smart enough to always keep enough free space on my phone, then that works for me. In the mean time I am trying Amazon Prime photos as a mass backup. Prime members have unlimited storage.
I guess my main concern was running out of iPhone storage but obviously still having iCloud storage (200gb). If iPhone is smart enough to always keep enough free space on my phone, then that works for me. In the mean time I am trying Amazon Prime photos as a mass backup. Prime members have unlimited storage.
Read my post. If you don't care about archiving, go ahead.
But why when there's Flickr with 1TB FREE without any gotchas?
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Actually, it is supposed to if you set the setting to optimize iPhone storage. I have never come close to the limit of my phone storage so I don't know how effective it is, but the option is there.
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Minute or not, it's not archival quality, i.e. it's not your original files. When I archive something, I want the original, not some mangled up version. But like I said, if archiving is not the objective, then it's fine.
Then again, why pay when there's Flickr with 1TB for FREE without any of these crap? Seriously, 1TB, FREE.
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There's an option to upload original (which would take up the 15GB space instead of being unlimited). If the file uploaded is bit-equal to the file on your phone, then you probably turned on this option.
I wasn't aware flikr gave 1TB free, good know. I suppose users should hope it doesn't end up like Microsoft where they gimped the free space to 5GB for new users after they the got fed up of people actually taking adavantage of the full space. Like the guy who used 75TB.
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If you have your space optimized. Your phone will start removing actual copies of the picture stored locally on your device as needed.
I should clarify that, in my last post above, I was using the free unlimited option. Don't just take my words, try it yourself.