I have written to Apple support about this, but have not receieved any useful or sensible answers (I'm guessing we'll have to ge visit one of those awful Apple stores, but my wife is on crutches just now & will need to hold). I'm wondering is this community might have any suggestions? Thanks in advance:
Cannot delete iCloud photos
We connot delete any photos from iCloud, it simply hangs and does nothing.
To put this into a little more context: some months ago we set up photo sharing between my phone & my wife's. I had to pay for addittional iCloud + storage which I then shared with my wife. Once we did this we quickly found out a couple of things that were not identified by Apple:
1) my wife also had to use the icloud storage for her account as well as mine (I'd thought I could simply share my photos with her), and
2) Apple never mentioned that no Albums could be shared (ie named, dated events in library bundles). In which case that was completely useless for what we wanted and expected.
So we discontinued the storage sharing, shared photo libraries and cancelled the iCloud+ payments.
Since then however, while my phone is fine, this is not the case with my wife's. [In both cases, we have no photos backup, phone backup, nothing, everything nutered apart from eMail & Safari backup].
So her phone starts complaining that she doen't have enough storage and makes this appear as though it is related to eMail space. It then turns off her account & she has no email. Eventually I relent and buy iCloud+ storage again and share this with her again ...
Turns out the above email /storage message is incorrect. In fact what is taking up some 30GB of iCloud storage is photos (her iCloud account, not mine). it would 'appear' that the earlier shared photos library has not been deleted from her iCloud account,
So then we log into iCloud and start to try to delete these photos but none of that works either. iCloud simply hangs and deletes nothing, waiting for hours, overnight etc. Delete does not work.
At present therefore we are forced to pay for shared storage so that my wife can continue to use her email account - but we cannot access these shared photos nor delete them. On her phone this storage is representd by a grey bar in iCoud storage as 'familly', on my phone as a light blue bar. Family 'usage' shows as 30.2GB but also cannot be deleted or cleared by either phone.
A truly dreadful system and am so sorry we ever signed up to that.
The only option provided be Apple's privacy & security login in appears to be to delete her account, clear iCould & start all over. Clearly unnacceptable becuase she would lose everything including important email records. Surley there must be a way that Apple themsleves could delete the shared library photos but ther is nothing to be found about this anywhere.
