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Free up space on iMac with iCloud

I needed to free up space on my iMac, didn’t even have enough memory to update. I turned on iCloud and added my photos to it, a large amount of photos at least 50,000 not sure how many GB that is. But it didn’t feel up any space on my iMac. I thought when you put photos in iCloud they were stored there and not on computer. How do I fix this?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Dec 28, 2020 10:03 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 28, 2020 11:16 AM

iCloud Photos is a syncing service. Any photo you delete from a device where iCloud Photos is turned on will also be deleted from iCloud and from any other device connected to iCloud Photos. If you turn on the Optimize Photos option, you can potentially reduce the storage space required on the device. See: Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support


Apple does not currently offer cloud-only storage for photos. If that is what you want or need, you may want to explore 3rd party options such as Google Photos or Dropbox.



1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 28, 2020 11:16 AM in response to lah76

iCloud Photos is a syncing service. Any photo you delete from a device where iCloud Photos is turned on will also be deleted from iCloud and from any other device connected to iCloud Photos. If you turn on the Optimize Photos option, you can potentially reduce the storage space required on the device. See: Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support


Apple does not currently offer cloud-only storage for photos. If that is what you want or need, you may want to explore 3rd party options such as Google Photos or Dropbox.



Free up space on iMac with iCloud

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