If I delete a photo from my iPhone, will it delete from iCloud too?

DareGod

Apple and how it handles photos has got to be almost on a par with Windows Vista for being a disaster, as far as I'm concerned. Is it just me? I have always found it very confusing and unnecessarily complicated, with regards to taking photos with your iPhone, trying to figure out where they are / are not backed-up to, and what happens to each photo at each different back-up location when you remove it from one location. Not only that but I have never been able to find a clearly defined answer to my questions regarding Apple photos apps and storage.

So what I'm left with is gigabytes' worth of photos on my iPhone that I'm too apprehensive to delete because Apple can't seem to give a clear explanation as to what will happen overall when I do that.

I'm working with iCloud, iOS 8.3 and Yosemite 10.10.3.

In my iPhone "Photos & Camera" settings:

iCloud Photo Library: ON
Optimise iPhone Storage: ON
Download and Keep Originals: Off
Upload to My Photo Stream: ON


Question:
If I delete photos off of my iPhone, will they remain backed up in iCloud?

Mimikyu

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DareGod

Captain Morgan wrote: »

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See, I find that so confusing. What's the point of the backup, then? Is it solely so that you'll have a copy of your photos if you lose your phone?

Captain Morgan wrote: »

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So, the Optimise Storage option is the only feature in this whole scenario which is designed to save space on your phone? (I thought one of the main points of iCloud was to save space on your phone, but evidently not.)

Captain Morgan wrote: »

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I have 2.6GB of photos on my phone. What are my options to reduce this dramatically without completely erasing the photos from existence?

Thanks for your response!

minikin

Connect iphone to your mac, open image capture or photos app, import all pics and vids to your pictures folder. You can delete all off your phone if you wish. Always back them up online too from your mac.

iCloud is a load of old howareya...

DareGod

minikin wrote: »

Connect iphone to your mac, open image capture or photos app, import all pics and vids to your pictures folder. You can delete all off your phone if you wish. Always back them up online too from your mac.

iCloud is a load of old howareya...

It has pissed me off, no end, I must admit. Apple do at lot of things really well but they surprisingly do some things that should be extremely simple in a violently irritating way.

DareGod

Or maybe it's just me.

I'm used to the Windows / Android way of simplicity. i.e. Copy & paste, or, If you upload a file to a second source, it's now on each source individually unless you delete the file from each source individually.

Aeternum

iCloud Photo library is a syncing service - it syncs the photos across all of your devices. So if you delete a photo from your iCloud library on one device, it will delete it off all devices.

BigMoose

I completely agree with how annoying iCloud is in this respect. Seems pointless except moving them from device to device. So I use Flicr - you can get it to auto upload as you take pictures and you dont need to keep them on the device. 1Tb free. This is what Apple should have provided via the iCloud, given the poxy size of a 16Gb iPhone!

Sad Professor

There’s a difference between backup service and syncing service. How iCloud works is pretty straightforward. Like Dropbox, it is primarily a syncing service. It syncs data across all devices, so that when you go to another device or computer, all your content is there along with any changes you’ve made to it.

Modern cloud services are built around syncing. I find the perception of the cloud as a backup tool a strange one. Dropbox defined what we now think of as “the cloud” and yet many people still think of the cloud as server that they can upload content to and delete it off their device, thus reducing the need for local storage. But that was never how Dropbox worked.

Sounds like you want a backup service.

Niemoj

Get Google Photos, that's on iOS now and it backs up all your photos, I'm not sure about on iOS but on Android it actually gave me a little prompt saying save xGB from your device by removing the originals, they'll still be backed up on the cloud.

Very useful service and free for photos up to 16Mp which is awell more than an iPhone camera anyway and up to 1080p for video!

DareGod

Cheers everyone!

skimpydoo

I use Carousel from Dropbox to back up my photos. Any photos deleted from my phone will always be on Carousel.