How to delete iPhone photo backup *without* deleting photos on iphone

[mtumesoul9]

Hi all - I want to stop iCloud backup of my photos, and started by changing those settings on my iPhone (and clicked keep photos on iPhone).

But there's still a big backup in iCloud that's hogging a lot of space; when I go to delete it, it warns that it will remove photos from my iPhone also. I'm guessing this is wrong - that it only deletes the photos from the iPhone if the photos backup is turned on. But I wanted to check before going ahead.

Many thanks in advance!

 

[RhetTbull]

Deleting the photos from iCloud will delete the photos from any device synced to iCloud. If your phone is no longer configured to sync photos to iCloud you should be fine. One way to test this before deleting the whole backup is to login to the web interface of iCloud and delete a couple photos from the Photos library then wait a bit and check to see those photos are still on your phone. I highly recommend you have a backup somewhere besides your phone before deleting the whole backup. You could use a tool like iCloud Photos Downloader to download a copy to your computer (or if using a Mac, create a synced Photos library on the Mac then turn off syncing once it's downloaded all the photos -- but, be sure to check in Photos preferences that it's configured to download originals to the Mac and "optimize storage" is not checked).

 

[mtumesoul9]

Deleting the photos from iCloud will delete the photos from any device synced to iCloud. If your phone is no longer configured to sync photos to iCloud you should be fine. One way to test this before deleting the whole backup is to login to the web interface of iCloud and delete a couple photos from the Photos library then wait a bit and check to see those photos are still on your phone. I highly recommend you have a backup somewhere besides your phone before deleting the whole backup. You could use a tool like iCloud Photos Downloader to download a copy to your computer (or if using a Mac, create a synced Photos library on the Mac then turn off syncing once it's downloaded all the photos -- but, be sure to check in Photos preferences that it's configured to download originals to the Mac and "optimize storage" is not checked).

this is really useful, thank you!!!