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I'm trying to help my son free up space on his iPhone 12. He is completely out of storage and I suggesting he off load the 33GB of photos/videos he's accumulated in his iphone lifetime. he rarely deletes anything - or looks at them that much for that matter but that's another story.
If he upgrades to the 99 cents a month level of iCloud he'd be fine. The instructions I've found to be able to upload and then delete from your phone say to turn off iCloud Photos and then click Remove from device.
Then what going forward? Some of the sites suggest signing into another iCloud account going forward. Huh? If iCloud photos is turned back on after deleting from the device will all the photos be reloaded to the iphone?
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Never ever depend on iCloud to store your invaluable photos.
It's not reliable primary storage. It's not a reliable backup. It's a primitive and incomplete sync-service that Apple does not advertise/promote honestly.
Use Image Capture or Photos to copy the entire collection to a Mac before you go messing around with offloading to iCloud.
Once you have the images in the Photos app, you can share an album back to yourself via iCloud to put copies of the images you want on the phone back on the phone. IMHO, this is the only reliable way to preserve your originals with iCloud in the mix.
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graylocks wrote:
[quote=Tiangou]
Never ever depend on iCloud to store your invaluable photos.
It's not reliable primary storage. It's not a reliable backup.
Use Image Capture or Photos to copy the entire collection to a Mac before you go messing around with offloading to iCloud.
My son does not have a computer. yep, he's one of those iPhone users.
Sorry. I added another bit in an edit as you were posting.
If he doesn't have a computer then use your own Mac for this purpose. You can use iCloud album-sharing to share an album with him from your own iCloud/Apple-ID account, or give him a user account on your Mac and let him sign in with his own Apple ID to better segregate his data from yours.
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I have never had an issue with iCloud photos. I take a picture or video on my iPhone. Presently it appears on my iPad or Mac.
There are other clouds that will do the same, such as dropbox, but not as seamlessly.
$.99 is almost nothing. Take it out of his allowance if you wish.
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iCloud is very reliable if one understands and conforms to what it does.
This is how it would roll your son’s situation:
Sign up for the 50gb plan, go to settings/appleID/icloud/photos, switch on iCloud photos, and wait for iCloud to do its thing.
For another take, go to settings/general/iPhone storage/ and see the recommendations.
I bet the first one will be to enable iCloud photos to save 30gb of local storage.
Offloading unused apps may help too. Info will be there too.
After this is done, do not erase the photos from the phone. iCloud will leave reduced versions of the library, and download full resolution upon request -all transparent to the user.
I will also say that a usb dongle could be connected to the phone, and have the whole library exported to it.
It can be done, and I would do that before the iCloud sync happens, but in the case of your son, nah…
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graylocks wrote:
he's an adult. Mom is willing to help him figure out solutions to a certain extent but there are limits. He doesn't want to lose his pictures but he's not willing to go through them and delete what he doesn't need. At 33GB I don't blame him but the solution will not involve protecting his reluctant *ss with my computer or resources.
It's advisable to make a backup before messing with anything that could blow away years of photos/videos.
Would you go so far as to allow him to use your computer with ImageCapture to copy the images from the phone to an external hard drive or flash drive before attempting to move a copy to the cloud and delete it from his device? This way, he won't be using your valuable drive-space, but you both get some peace of mind.
