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Deleting Photos on Hard Drive also deletes in iCloud

I need to free up space on my hard drive so I decided to move my Photo Library to iCloud. (I bought extra storage.) I have successfully moved the photos, but if I try to delete them from my hard drive they also get deleted from the iCloud. I don't get the message "is it OK to delete from hard drive" as some have stated in a previous post. I'm running High Sierra, if that means anything. Any suggestions? Thanks.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Oct 13, 2020 3:21 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 13, 2020 3:23 PM

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. You can potentially reduce the storage space required on a device by turning on Optimize Storage. See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264


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.



2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 13, 2020 3:23 PM in response to Micah.TX

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. You can potentially reduce the storage space required on a device by turning on Optimize Storage. See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264


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.



Deleting Photos on Hard Drive also deletes in iCloud

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