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taptic

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 5, 2012
1,341
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California
If I have an iPhone syncing photos to my Mac over iCloud, how can I delete certain ones from my iPhone while still keeping them on the Mac?
 

Brookzy

macrumors 601
May 30, 2010
4,976
5,573
UK
iCloud Photo Library is a way to keep a single photo library in iCloud, which is accessible from all your devices. iCloud's photos can be considered the "master" copy, and all your devices can access that master, and add to it, and make changes to it, on demand. But the principle is that there is one, single, constant library between all those devices.

What you need is My Photo Stream.

This is different: My Photo Stream uploads your taken photos to iCloud temporarily, and pushes those photos to all your devices that have My Photo Stream enabled. The photos are then deleted from iCloud after 30 days (or when the Photo Stream reaches its limit of 1000 photos - old photos begin to be deleted as others are uploaded). This does not count towards your iCloud storage limit.

The principle is that 30 days is long enough for your photos to reach iCloud and be downloaded to your Mac or PC, where they are then saved (the photos stay saved on your Mac or PC permanently and are not deleted after 30 days).

This article explains it all and how to set it up.
[doublepost=1472669189][/doublepost]One more thing: if the reason you are deleting photos from your iPhone is because you're running out of storage, turn on "Optimise iPhone Storage" in Settings > Photos & Camera.

This converts your lesser-viewed photos to low-resolution copies stored on your iPhone, whilst the iCloud copy stays in the original, high-resolution form. When you go to view an older, low-resolution photo, your iPhone will download the original from iCloud on demand, thus saving space.
 
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