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User profile for user: goodbichon
goodbichon Author
User level: Level 1
4 points

Relationship between iphone, mac, and icloud if sync has not always been on

To make space on my computer, I spent a whole day deleting photos and videos in the mac photo app. This is media I want to lose forever on all devices. However, the sync between my mac and icloud was off during this time. And I now notice these photos and videos I deleted are still on my icloud and iphone, which makes total sense. But ideally I want this media to delete from my iphone and icloud too. So If i resync my mac to icloud, will it then delete these pics from mac and iphone?


To make matters a bit more complicated, there is a whole bunch of media (from last two weeks) on my iphone and icloud, which is NOT on my mac, but which I definitely do not want to lose. (so it is not a simple case of wanting the media currently on my mac to be exactly what i have on all devices)


So my ultimate goal is to have iphone/mac/icloud all synced up again showing same media, but crucially: 1) with the media I deleted on the mac deleted from all, and 2) the new media from last two weeks on iphone/icloud retained.


Can anyone see a way of doing this easily?


I'm really unclear how this all works as regards which device (mac or iphone) is regarded as the ultimate source of truth, if it even works like that...


Happy to try and explain the situation in a different way if that would be helpful.

iPhone 12 mini, iOS 17

Posted on Aug 31, 2024 9:37 AM

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1 reply
User profile for user: Richard.Taylor
Richard.Taylor
User level: Level 6
10,446 points

Sep 1, 2024 8:37 AM in response to goodbichon

goodbichon wrote: ... So If i resync my mac to icloud, will it then delete these pics from mac and iphone?

Did you permanently delete the pictures by deleting them from Recently Deleted on your Mac? I'm not really sure what happens if you didn't, but if you did erase them completely, then they will be restored when you re-connect to iCloud Photos.


When you connect a new Library to iCloud (which is what you will be doing,) iCloud will not erase pictures which it already has just because they are not in the new Library. This is a very good thing. Photos will copy any pictures from the Mac to iCloud that are not already there, and then it will copy any pictures from iCloud to the Mac which are not already on the Mac. It will do the same for all the devices until they all have the same pictures.


I can't think of any way to identify the pictures that are not there.

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Relationship between iphone, mac, and icloud if sync has not always been on

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