Question for anyone familiar with icloud

[Doug_Dangger]

I looked at Apple's faq and it didn't answer my question.

 

Why question is: Say you have a 64GB iphone and the pictures and videos in the phone is about to exceed 64GB.  Can I offload say 30GB of pictures to icloud, free up 30GB from the phone and use the new free space?  Second part of the question is if I wanted to access and view those files uploaded to icloud,could I view it from the cloud or would I have to clear up space on my phone, download the files and view them?

 

I don't have an iphone.  I'm thinking of getting one.  The extra 64GB is above my budget.  However my company will reimburse icloud which is like $3 a month.

[Entropy.]

3 minutes ago, Doug_Dangger said:

I looked at Apple's faq and it didn't answer my question.

 

Why question is: Say you have a 64GB iphone and the pictures and videos in the phone is about to exceed 64GB.  Can I offload say 30GB of pictures to icloud, free up 30GB from the phone and use the new free space?  Second part of the question is if I wanted to access and view those files uploaded to icloud,could I view it from the cloud or would I have to clear up space on my phone, download the files and view them?

 

I don't have an iphone.  I'm thinking of getting one.  The extra 64GB is above my budget.  However my company will reimburse icloud which is like $3 a month.

Iirc that's not possible. Just use onedrive or dropbox instead. 

[57chevy]

2 hours ago, Doug_Dangger said:

Why question is: Say you have a 64GB iphone and the pictures and videos in the phone is about to exceed 64GB.  Can I offload say 30GB of pictures to icloud, free up 30GB from the phone and use the new free space?  Second part of the question is if I wanted to access and view those files uploaded to icloud,could I view it from the cloud or would I have to clear up space on my phone, download the files and view them?

If your phone had say, 30gb of photos and videos.  Then your iCloud will have 30gb of photos and videos. If you offload all 30gb from your phone, you offload it from iCloud as well.  It's a direct sync as well as cloud storage.  So if you delete a photo from your phone, you also delete it from your iCloud. Same goes for the reverse.  Delete it from iCloud, and it deletes from your phone. The only way to free up space on your phone is to go to your iCloud, download the photos and videos to your computer, and then delete them all from iCloud.  This will free up space on your phone when it syncs.  But you can probably guess the problem with this method.  You can try google photos maybe.  They have unlimited storage for photos and videos and they have an app for iOS. Not sure how they handle the files saved to their cloud vs on your phone though.  But might be worth a look. 

[Commodus]

As 57chevy said. iCloud's photo syncing is meant to be about consistent access on devices rather than storage. (If you lose or wipe your phone you can still get those pictures back, of course).

 

I'd point you to Google Photos if you want an easy way to back up your shots, but all images will count toward your Google storage quota as of June. You'd need to spend extra to fit that 30GB of photos regardless, so it would really come down to the philosophical approach to cloud photos and how much you like Apple's integration.

[Flannelist]

As long as you have enough storage in your iCloud, yes. There is an option called "Optimize Storage" under iCloud photos. The only downside of this is it's all automated. So you can't pick and chose. It uploads your whole photo library, and prunes into the cloud the oldest stuff I think? But essentially it detects when storage is getting "full" and offloads stuff when it thinks its necessary. It's still accessible to the phone, or a mac, or icloud.com but it's not stored locally on the phone in those cases.

I used to run into issues with this when I worked for Geek Squad and people would try to import photos to a computer and it wouldn't import all of them and then get confused. Because not all the pictures were on the phone to import.

[Roswell]

20 hours ago, Doug_Dangger said:

I looked at Apple's faq and it didn't answer my question.

 

Why question is: Say you have a 64GB iphone and the pictures and videos in the phone is about to exceed 64GB.  Can I offload say 30GB of pictures to icloud, free up 30GB from the phone and use the new free space?  Second part of the question is if I wanted to access and view those files uploaded to icloud,could I view it from the cloud or would I have to clear up space on my phone, download the files and view them?

 

I don't have an iphone.  I'm thinking of getting one.  The extra 64GB is above my budget.  However my company will reimburse icloud which is like $3 a month.

Yes, there's an option to do exactly that on the phone. Once you run out of space it will keep the cloud backups and remove them locally.

 

20 hours ago, Brok3n But who cares? said:

Iirc that's not possible. Just use onedrive or dropbox instead. 

 

17 hours ago, 57chevy said:

If your phone had say, 30gb of photos and videos.  Then your iCloud will have 30gb of photos and videos. If you offload all 30gb from your phone, you offload it from iCloud as well.  It's a direct sync as well as cloud storage.  So if you delete a photo from your phone, you also delete it from your iCloud. Same goes for the reverse.  Delete it from iCloud, and it deletes from your phone. The only way to free up space on your phone is to go to your iCloud, download the photos and videos to your computer, and then delete them all from iCloud.  This will free up space on your phone when it syncs.  But you can probably guess the problem with this method.  You can try google photos maybe.  They have unlimited storage for photos and videos and they have an app for iOS. Not sure how they handle the files saved to their cloud vs on your phone though.  But might be worth a look. 

This is wrong. 

[Entropy.]

2 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

Yes, there's an option to do exactly that on the phone. Once you run out of space it will keep the cloud backups and remove them locally.

 

 

This is wrong. 

Can you show where? 

[Roswell]

2 minutes ago, Brok3n But who cares? said:

Can you show where? 

"Optimize iPhone storage" in photos settings. It's the third option from the top. If you run out of space it deletes the full res videos and photos and leaves behind 720p~ highly compressed versions. If you're connected to the internet when you view the compressed version it will auto download the original so you can view it in original detail.