I'm completely lost on iCloud Photo Library.. can someone help me?

[OrlandoTragic]

So I signed up for the 50GB a month iCloud plan, and uploaded all of my photos (about 25GB).

The purpose of me doing this was to be able to access photos from all my devices without the photos downloading locally.

Now, when I check my 32GB iPad Pro, I'm seeing that over 10GB of space is being used by Photo Library.

Why? Why are any photos being stored locally? I thought the purpose of iCloud Photo Library was to have your photos in the cloud, not taking up any local storage space....

Am I missing something? Thank you, and I'm sorry if this is a stupid question.

 

[egeek84]

Actually the whole purpose of iCloud Photo Library is to have a central and synced library for your photos and videos. What that means is if you decide to edit and/or add or remove pictures, those changes will take place immediately across all your devices.

It's not just a place for you to dump files. It basically mirrors whatever is on your iPad. The extra storage you signed up for allows you to take more pictures/videos on your devices and have them synced to your icloud library rather than being limited to only 5 gigs.

Hope this kinda makes sense but yeah, it's more of a file syncing service like Microsoft's OneDrive rather than just an online storage provider.

 

[OrlandoTragic]

That does make sense - thank you. I figured out that "Optimizing" the library on my iPad helped me reduce the size of the storage taken up. I'm assuming this loads a much lower quality picture, but that's ok.

I appreciate your help!

 

[egeek84]

Actually you shouldn't see too much of a difference, if any, with the optimized setting on mobile devices since it would be much harder to tell the difference between original and optimized on screens that small.

No problem

 

[bmodi]

You have two options. Download all photos locally to your ipad or just use "optimized". Optimized means it just has a preview of the photo and only when you open it, it downloads it.....and as long as you have enough space on your device it will keep photos downloaded on your device even with the "optimized" setting.

The less space you have on your device the less photos it will keep downloaded.

How exactly the logic behind this works.....no one with the exception of Apple knows... .
With logic i mean, how does IOS "decide" if it keeps photos downloaded compared to the remaining space on your device....as far as i know no one knows how exactly the "implemented rules" are.