Storage on iCloud
I don’t like having all my photos on iPhone. I would like to have them stored in iCloud and not the phone. Then when I want to view them I can pull them down from iCloud. How do I do that?
iPhone 6s, iOS 15
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If your photos are in the Photos app and Photos are synced in iCloud, then your photos are in both places. In principle, Photos in the app is just a mirror of iCloud. If you delete a picture in the Photo app, it is also deleted from iCloud, and vice versa.
You can also save your photos in iCloud Drive. Simply by moving your photos to a folder in iCloud Drive. That way, your photos are away from your Photo app, but you can always access them in the Files app, share them, edit etc. while the photos are stored safely in iCloud. You can also "Offload" them - so that the images do not take up your iPhone's internal memory, this is one of the great advantages of saving them in iCloud Drive.
iCloud Drive works just like a Dropbox, Google Drive or some of the other cloud storage services.
To move one or more photos to iCloud Drive:
1. Open the Files app, select iCloud Drive
2. Create a new folder, call it ex. Pictures.
3. Open the Photo app
4. Mark the pictures you want to move and press the "Share" button (Square with up arrow)
5. Select Move to Files
6. Find the folder you just created and save them there.
When all the pictures have been moved, you can actually delete them from the Photo app. But remember to check that you have moved everything before you delete Recently Deleted. If you want one or more photos back in the Photo app, you can always download them again from iCloud Drive.