You can store as many photos as possible on your iPhone or Mac with iCloud. This way, you ensure that iCloud photos take up even less space on your devices.
Optimize your iCloud photos storage
Storing your photos in iCloud not only ensures that all your captured moments are backed up, but also that the photos take up less space on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.
The pictures still take up space, and with a simple setting you can determine how much space that is. It is possible to have iCloud photos occupy even less space on your device than they do by default. iPhone shows how to do that.
This is how you optimize your iCloud photos on your iPhone or iPad
- Open Settings and go to ‘Photos’;
- If you want photos and videos to be automatically saved to iCloud, make sure the slider is green behind ‘iCloud Photos’;
- Below that are two options: ‘Optimize iPhone Storage’ and ‘Download and Keep Originals’. Choose the first, after which a check mark appears behind it.
Choosing this setting automatically replaces full-resolution photos with smaller, device-tailored versions. The full-resolution versions can be found at any time in iCloud, and you can download them in full resolution from the cloud.
This saves a lot on your storage space, but your sharp photos will not be lost. This way you don’t have to delete photos as quickly or even ever to free up space. The same can be set on the Mac. You do this as follows.
Optimize iCloud Photos on Mac
- Open the Photos app and click on ‘Preferences’ in the menu bar;
- Go to the ‘iCloud’ tab;
- If the option ‘iCloud Photos’ is checked here, you can choose the following options: ‘Download originals to this Mac’ or ‘Optimize Mac storage’. Choose the second option.
On the Mac, the optimization works the same, replacing the full-resolution photos and videos with smaller files.
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