Backup iPhone photos, but remove the preview from phone, too?

[bboyce2009]

I am looking for the best way to make a digital backup of my photos, but not exactly through iCloud. They are already backed up there, but even having the tens of thousands of previews is annoying and overwhelming, so I want to start fresh while still maintaining a reliable backup. I’d just prefer relegating my current photos to hide away in an app that isn’t so intrusive and full as my iPhone’s photo library.

Any program suggestions, or methods to save these and still empty the iPhone Photo app so I can start fresh? Thanks!

 

[now i see it]

If you’ve got iCloud Photos enabled, any picture you delete off your phone will get deleted of of iCloud too - so it’s not a backup option.

The easiest way to back up your entire photo library on your iPhone is to copy them over to a Mac using the included free app Image Capture.

Plug the iPhone into the Mac, launch Image Capture then select all the images to copy over.
Maybe don’t try to do thousands at a time. It might choke.

 

[bboyce2009]

If you’ve got iCloud Photos enabled, any picture you delete off your phone will get deleted of of iCloud too - so it’s not a backup option.

The easiest way to back up your entire photo library on your iPhone is to copy them over to a Mac using the included free app Image Capture.

Plug the iPhone into the Mac, launch Image Capture then select all the images to copy over.
Maybe don’t try to do thousands at a time. It might choke.

Is that viable when there are tons of pictures, many of which are stored in iCloud? Will Image Captcher cause them to be downloaded from the cloud via my phone, onto my Mac? And could I attach an external drive to re-route the saving into that instead of the internal SSD?

 

[VineRider]

I use OneDrive. On my iPhone i have camera backup turned on and it copies all my iCloud photos into OneDrive. Very seamless and if I delete items from iCloud they are still available on OneDrive. I think Google Photo's does something similar so there are various cloud based options.

 

[now i see it]

You’d probably have to download all the original hi res images to your iPhone before doing an Image Capture transfer. Image Capture I’m sure isn’t smart enough to pluck them from iCloud.

You can play with image capture right now to see how it works. You don’t have to copy over all your images- just transfer a few and see what you can do with it.
I think you can save the images anywhere. Don’t think it has to be on the internal drive (but not 100% sure).
Play with it and find out.

 

[bboyce2009]

You’d probably have to download all the original hi res images to your iPhone before doing an Image Capture transfer. Image Capture I’m sure isn’t smart enough to pluck them from iCloud.

You can play with image capture right now to see how it works. You don’t have to copy over all your images- just transfer a few and see what you can do with it.
I think you can save the images anywhere. Don’t think it has to be on the internal drive (but not 100% sure).
Play with it and find out.

Thank you, I really appreciate your insight!