Help getting started with Icloud photos on multiple devices and other photo questions

dannyjo22

dannyjo22

dannyjo22

Caporegime
Joined
9 May 2005
Posts
31,894
Location
Cambridge
I've always avoided using icloud photos and backed my iphone photos to onedrive as I didn't like the synching with apple where if you delete the photograph from your phone you delete it everywhere.

I have organised all my iphone photographs into albums on my Mac. I now want to start using icloud for my photographs but I'm unsure what happens if I turn this on across my devices. Will I end up with duplicates as my Mac has them organised already from manually importing them over the years, where as on my iphone they are just dumped on there in no order as they were taken. Same with my ipad.

Would I be better to import all my photos from phone and ipad onto my mac, continuing the organisation. Then take every photo off my ipad and iphone and then turn on icloud photos?

I'm still going to carry on uploading to onedrive as well as an unsynced back up.
 
I would remove all photos from the other devices then enable iCloud on the Mac. Once it has completed the upload you can enable iCloud on other devices and sync.

I do believe it detects duplicates.
 
LiE said:
I would remove all photos from the other devices then enable iCloud on the Mac. Once it has completed the upload you can enable iCloud on other devices and sync.

I do believe it detects duplicates.
Click to expand...
Thanks I will do that, move the ipad and phone pictures into my current mac library, delete them all off the devices and then turn on icloud photos :)
 
Another question I have is if I hit optimise storage on the iphone. If I take a photo now how long does that photo stay as the full size image before it's optimised? I'm thinking if it will upload the full version to my onedrive back up or a smaller quality image?
 
So I've more photo's question now I've finally got round to organising all my own photos and using icloud. Used a nice guide and quickly organised my thousands of iphone photos into albums.

Now I want to do my wifes 4 billion. But I don't want her filling my mac space up but it's much faster to organise using the Mac.

Can I import all her photo's into a separate library on my Mac and not have them merge with my own cloud storage? I want to be able to delete them off my Mac when organised and leave them on her ipad and phone using icloud.

Or will I have to make her a separate profile on my Mac and then delete that afterwards?

Can I then remove the Mac from synching to icloud but leave it working on her phone and ipad?
 
It'll make your life a lot easier if you set up a separate account and sign in using your wife's iCloud account. That means that all your wife's pics will be visible in Photos without needing to download them to the Mac and you can organise them into albums in Photos. Once finished you can then remove the Wife Account from your Mac all will be well.
 
Thanks, I'm not having a very good experience so far with cloud synching. It set up fine on my phone and Mac initially. I took some photo's today, came home and my photos won't synch unless I manually force it. I get a paused message and the following message: Syncing paused, optimising battery power. Despite having a 100% battery on a month old phone.
 
So far I've sorted out all my own photo's and using my mac storage and icloud. I don't have a tenth of the photo's my wife has.

I have now set up another login and sorted my wifes clogged iphone and put her photo library on my external drive (always connected) to save my internal storage space on mac.

Now I need to import into her library about 8 years of photo's we had to previously drag off her phone to create space. Now there will I'm sure be lot's of duplication that the photos app can handle but what about conflicting file names? If there a way to batch rename any file name duplicates so I don't have to check each file one after another? Then I can use the duplicates to clear any genuine image duplication over file name duplication.

Then I have my son's to do :( Thank the maker for smart folders, why don't these exist on ipad too!
 
I’m sure it’s been said before but if you set up iCloud syncing then the photos will be uploaded to iCloud and space freed on the relevant phone. If an uploaded photo needs to be viewed then it will be downloaded from iCloud. Obviously you’ll need enough space on iCloud but it’s a neat way to do things without having to do all this downloading and organising
 
Last edited:
So if you’ve done that and all the pics are on iCloud, why do you need to import any libraries? You just need to sign into iCloud on the relevant account, open Photos and all the pics will be there. I’m sure I’m missing something as to what you’re trying to do :D
 
Yeah I've set her up with the 10,000 pictures she had on her iphone. Cleaned them up into albums and synced with the cloud. Optimised her storage. That covers all the photo's she took from 2020-24. I now have to add to that library with everything from iphone 4 days to 2020 :D My concern is what happens when I drag is say Img1234.jpg and there's already a file called that but it's not the same picture. I don't want to individually have to rename all the files. Is there some way to do it on import automatically?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom