Cleaning up iCloud storage/deleting pictures
May 19, 2018 7:54 PM   Subscribe

I'm a semi-recent convert to the iPhone and didn't realize for a while that it was automatically uploading everything I saved to the camera roll to my iCloud account. I don't actually want 95% of those pictures backed up, and now I'm getting the message that I'm out of space. What is the easiest way to delete these and avoid this in the future?

95% of the pictures I save to my phone are memes, doggos, cool cosplayers, panels from comics, Tumblr silliness, etc. I like having these photos on my phone to send friends, but I absolutely do not need them backed up in the cloud. My phone until recently was set to automatically upload everything from the camera roll into iCloud and now I'm getting the message that my iCloud storage is full, presumably with memes and doggos.

1) How do I delete these useless pictures from iCloud? Is there a way to do that without deleting them from my phone? If I do need to delete them from my phone, do I need to set my photo library back to syncing with iCloud or will it still automatically delete them?

2) In the future, if I leave the option to automatically upload and store photos in the cloud off, can I save pictures to my phone to my heart's content and not have to worry about it?

3) Conversely, if there are photos I want to save to iCloud (usually when we go out of town and I take a bunch of pictures), is there a way to manually save those photos to the cloud? I don't know if turning the sync option back on would only apply to newly taken/saved photos from that point on, or if I turned it back on would it go through and upload all the previously saved pictures that weren't already in iCloud?

TL;DR - Basically I want to fill my iPhone up with pointless memes and only save important pictures to iCloud, and get rid of all the pointless photos that are already stored there. Help! Thank you!
posted by skycrashesdown to Technology (3 answers total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
From what I can tell, deleting pictures from iCloud will delete them from your phone, and syncing to the iCloud is an all-or-nothing kind of deal; there's no option to selectively upload. If storage space is your concern, is there any reason that you can't just turn off iCloud for photos and instead use Google Photos? Free unlimited storage space for up to 16 megapixels or 1080p.
posted by eyeball at 5:27 PM on May 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Here's a suggestion
1. Go to your iPhone's backup settings and disable backing up your photo library
2. Create a Google account and use the Google Photos app to backup all your photos to the cloud. It's free for an unlimited amount of photos (in phone quality).
posted by oxit at 11:51 AM on May 21, 2018


Also, if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can doubly backup your photos to a separate cloud without worrying about the storage limits (no videos, just unlimited photos). But Google Photos is better because it's free, and it also has AI to help declutter your photos.
posted by mhh5 at 10:13 AM on May 22, 2018


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