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Photos and iCloud

With thousands of photos in 'Photos' on my Mac, I want to store all on my mac, but use iCloud for select photos only (i.e. an album). Can this be done? If yes, how?

iMac 21.5", macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 14, 2020 10:57 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 14, 2020 11:08 AM

iCloud Photos is all or nothing. The complete library will sync with iCloud. To keep the majority of your photos only local, you may want use two Photos Libraries, one for syncing with iCloud and one as a local archive of all photos. The library you are using with iCloud needs to be the system photo library; this is the only library that the Media Browser and other applications can see.


You could also use Shared albums to sync selected photos to your other devices. Shared albums do not count against your free cloud storage, but they are storing the photos only in a slightly reduced size.


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 14, 2020 11:08 AM in response to RholderTPA

iCloud Photos is all or nothing. The complete library will sync with iCloud. To keep the majority of your photos only local, you may want use two Photos Libraries, one for syncing with iCloud and one as a local archive of all photos. The library you are using with iCloud needs to be the system photo library; this is the only library that the Media Browser and other applications can see.


You could also use Shared albums to sync selected photos to your other devices. Shared albums do not count against your free cloud storage, but they are storing the photos only in a slightly reduced size.


Photos and iCloud

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