You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

nueve_leon Author

Level 1

66 points

How do I prevent my photos/videos from being downloaded locally?

I've finally given in and bought 2tb of storage on iCloud so I could access my photos across all my devices while not having to store those images locally. I assumed Photos on my mac would simply act as a way to view my images stored in iCloud. But Photos seems to want to download all my images locally.

Up until now I always managed my photos and videos by manually transferring them to my computer using Image Capture and then loading them into Adobe Lightroom. I bought the iCloud storage so I could use the Photos app while also avoiding using local storage to keep my images.

However when I just switched on iCloud photos on my Mac it said it was downloading my images.

Is there a way to use iCloud Photos on my Mac without downloading the images locally?

I am going to be using Photos across 3 different macs - so I definitely do not want to have my Photos Library stored locally on each machine.

Posted on May 2, 2021 8:32 AM

Top-ranking reply

TonyCollinet

Level 7

23,954 points

Posted on May 2, 2021 12:27 PM

Turn on "optimise mac storage in photos icloud preferences.

Full size images will then only be stored in iCloud with small previews kept on your mac. The full size image will be downloaded if needed for edit, print or export.

View in context

How do I prevent my photos/videos from being downloaded locally?

Similar questions