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Wavy809

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 9, 2021
2
0
So I want to know if anyone can answer this question. Am I able to save all my pictures saved on a hard drive to my iCloud account and then proceed to delete all photos from such hard drive, while keeping all the photos saved on iCloud?
 

hg.wells

macrumors 65816
Apr 1, 2013
1,055
785
Technically yes, however you want to make sure your data is backed up in multiple places. Ideally your data should be in a couple of locations. If something goes wrong and all your photos get deleted from iCloud, Apple can’t help you.
 

Wavy809

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 9, 2021
2
0
Technically yes, however you want to make sure your data is backed up in multiple places. Ideally your data should be in a couple of locations. If something goes wrong and all your photos get deleted from iCloud, Apple can’t help you.
Okay dude thanks for your help!!
 

Apleeseed84

macrumors 6502a
Oct 22, 2020
851
606
I've done this, i have 700 gb in photos. if you have a windows pc, log in to icloud.com and manually download your photos a 1000 at a time always remember that. You can CTRL select them that also rather than selecting them one at a time.

Also the cloud with arrow icon pointed down has a hidden menu, if you hold the mouse icon for more than 2 seconds you get prompted to download the unraw unedited versions of your photos(*.heic) formats or the regular *jpeg versions which icloud.com automatically converts them to compatible versions.

I personally download my videos in unedited format and get the pictures in a compatible format just because i don't like the conversion afterwards.
 

Joe323

macrumors newbie
Sep 8, 2006
27
0
Similar question but I want to keep the photos on my Mac while backing them up on iCloud. Is there a way to do this without having the photos also show up on my iPhone and iPad?
 

Apleeseed84

macrumors 6502a
Oct 22, 2020
851
606
Similar question but I want to keep the photos on my Mac while backing them up on iCloud. Is there a way to do this without having the photos also show up on my iPhone and iPad?
You can do this by turning icloud photos setting under Photos to “off”, that means the pictures stay locally in your idevice’s flash drive and isolates it from icloud.
 

Joe323

macrumors newbie
Sep 8, 2006
27
0
You can do this by turning icloud photos setting under Photos to “off”, that means the pictures stay locally in your idevice’s flash drive and isolates it from icloud.
I should have mentioned that I do want to have my iPhone/iPad photos backed up to iCloud, just not the ones on my laptop that were taken with a regular camera to save on my phone storage space (I am aware of the Optimize iPhone Storage setting).

Would it work if I kept my Mac photos folder as an iCloud Drive folder instead?
 

Apleeseed84

macrumors 6502a
Oct 22, 2020
851
606
I should have mentioned that I do want to have my iPhone/iPad photos backed up to iCloud, just not the ones on my laptop that were taken with a regular camera to save on my phone storage space (I am aware of the Optimize iPhone Storage setting).

Would it work if I kept my Mac photos folder as an iCloud Drive folder instead?
That’s a bit tough, the only way would be to yes, keep the icloud settings turned on to be backed up to the cloud.

So to get this straight you want to back up your Mac and iphone/ipad photos under the same account and not worry about each other‘s pictures downloading to be either the Mac or iphone correct?

Once you upload your photo from your idevice to the cloud it will converge with the Mac, but it won’t download to your Mac and viceversa because you have the optimized iphone storage setting on.

What happens is that you will see a cached version of your picture that won’t download to your device unless you want to see it, until then you can see your Mac pictures but they won’t download unless you specifically ask it to. Then you can do a prolonged hold to delete it from your device if it takes too much space.

By default though iphoto sorts the pictures by dates, or different categories like portrait, selfies, etc but you can manually create your own album similar to a folder and create more sub folders and sort them out that way.

I had this exact problem because I wanted to have a way to see all my pictures from all devices so i had to upload all my photos to my ipad and it synced them up to the cloud, ever since, i just download them manually from icloud.com and back them on another hard drive just in Case because i realized that manually backing them up from an ipad and iphone was always almost impossible.
 

Joe323

macrumors newbie
Sep 8, 2006
27
0
That’s a bit tough, the only way would be to yes, keep the icloud settings turned on to be backed up to the cloud.

So to get this straight you want to back up your Mac and iphone/ipad photos under the same account and not worry about each other‘s pictures downloading to be either the Mac or iphone correct?

Once you upload your photo from your idevice to the cloud it will converge with the Mac, but it won’t download to your Mac and viceversa because you have the optimized iphone storage setting on.

What happens is that you will see a cached version of your picture that won’t download to your device unless you want to see it, until then you can see your Mac pictures but they won’t download unless you specifically ask it to. Then you can do a prolonged hold to delete it from your device if it takes too much space.

By default though iphoto sorts the pictures by dates, or different categories like portrait, selfies, etc but you can manually create your own album similar to a folder and create more sub folders and sort them out that way.

I had this exact problem because I wanted to have a way to see all my pictures from all devices so i had to upload all my photos to my ipad and it synced them up to the cloud, ever since, i just download them manually from icloud.com and back them on another hard drive just in Case because i realized that manually backing them up from an ipad and iphone was always almost impossible.
Thanks. Yes I would like to use iCloud more as a backup instead of service that just syncs files across devices. I do already use Backblaze as a backup solution for my MBP but wanted to utilize iCloud for redundancy for my media files.
 
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