Other Can I force offload my photos from my iPhone?

[Super Xander]

Hi forum

I just brought a higher iCloud storage capacity to offload my photos to iCloud Photo Library and use Photo optimize to save of storage. What I realize is that offload storage management works very poor in the start, both that the phone over time need to realize, what photo I use frequency and not, and because the storage capacity need to be close to max before doing some serious offload.

I use my local storage on iPhone very active and can one day need 10-20GB for the day space of free storage, therefore it won't work for me, if iPhone 'only' has 5GB of storage left and I then can't use it because not most photos are offloaded.

So long story short. I'm asking for a way (both complicated or easy) to offload photos from iPhone through iCloud Photo Library - not through third part options.

I still have an idea there may work but take some time, have anyone of you tried to do anything like this with good results?

1) Sync all my iPhone photos to iCloud (I can check if they are sync on iCloud.com)
2) Turn off iCloud Photo Library on iPhone
3) All the still unloaded photos might/will still be there on the iPhone. Then I can delete all of them.
4) Turn on iCloud Photo Library again.

If I'm right, this will force offload all my iPhone photos and free up space without missing anything - I know that it will take some time to sync.

If I know on advance I need to use a couple of GB on my phone, I'll be able to do this before to free up space?

Sorry for my bad English. Hope most of it makes sense.

Regards.

 

[akash.nu]

You can’t force anything. Depending on the available storage the pictures will get downloaded on your device automatically.

Your best option is to just leave the phone on charge every night and keep using things as usual. It’ll get itself sorted.

 

[cynics]

Have you plugged the iPhone in on wifi and left it overnight? I had 16gb of photos on my iPhone a couple weeks ago, now I have 718mb with 35gb of free space. Probably just takes time. Sync'ing with iTunes (without syncing data) sometimes kick starts processes for me too. Used too anyway...

I believe the low resolution encoding is done on the device. You'll occasionally notice 3rd storage usage apps will say you have more data on the iPhone then iOS reports. This is likely the iPhone holding on to the high resolution just in case so it doesn't need to download, but ready to be purged if storage space is required. Point of bringing that up....I would just try to drop a 5-10gb file on your iPhone and see what it does...

If you are really impatient (or have a deadline) just back up the iPhone to iCloud and restore it. Only takes a few minutes, then put it on charge and let it rebuild its databases overnight. In the morning you should have a clean slate....well as clear as it can be without deleting stuff off the iPhone.

 

[ilikewhey]

I was in a similar situation 2 weeks ago, my only solution was to use google photo as it let me offload photos and videos without deleting a copy off iCloud

 

[cynics]

I was in a similar situation 2 weeks ago, my only solution was to use google photo as it let me offload photos and videos without deleting a copy off iCloud

You would need to manually delete the photo from your library to delete it from iCloud. Even if you restored and sold all your Apple devices the photos would still be there waiting for you to either get a new device and log in with your AppleID or going to iCloud.com to view them.

You're right if you mean you can't completely offload them from your iPhone if you just dont want them anymore but dont want to delete them forever. However the OP has 2tb of iCloud space, I would just upload them to iCloud Drive in his case to avoid need to pay someone else for cloud space OR loosing the original quality/resolution.

 

[fred98tj]

You also need to realize that iCloud is not designed as a cloud storage mechanism, it’s a sync platform, not for cloud Storage. If you’re syncing your photos on your phone (and any other Apple products you may have) and you delete a photo on your phone (or any other syncd device), then it gets deleted on iCloud also.

 

[akash.nu]

I was in a similar situation 2 weeks ago, my only solution was to use google photo as it let me offload photos and videos without deleting a copy off iCloud

You situation was different. You wanted to delete the pictures off the phone but the OP just wants to speed up the iCloud sync process and doesn’t necessarily want to delete them from the device.

 

[Super Xander]

Thanks for the advice.
I figured out that I wanted to try my case out on iPad. It had 40GB of photo storage locally on the device. Turning off iCloud Photo Library (after all of it was synced to iCloud) then deleting all photos storage on iPad and turning on iCloud Photo storage. So far it worked for me only 800MB of used storage. Let's see if it will hold.