Can I store photos on iCloud and NOT on my iPhone?

DrumsOfGrohl · May 17, 2016

I recently downgraded to a 16gb iPhone 6 (its a long story, actually its not that long, but I don't want to get into it).

Obviously, I'm struggling with keeping my storage low. I have plenty of storage room on my iCloud, and I was wondering if there was a way I could take a photo, have it uploaded to iCloud, then delete it from my phone and still have access to it. What I have right now is that the photos on my iCloud are just a mirror of the photos on my phone, so when I delete it from my phone, it gets deleted from iCloud.
Is there something I can set up so that when I delete it from my phone, I can choose whether it gets deleted from iCloud or not?

Or is there some other way to optimize space on my phone I'm not thinking about?

J. A. · May 17, 2016

iCloud Photo Library works the way you've experienced it, and there's no setting to change it's behaviour.
There's one feature that can help with your storage space:
In Settings - Photos & Camera, select Optimize iPhone Storage. When you're low on space, iCloud will put optimized versions of images and videos to your iPhone, while it will save the full resolutions versions in iCloud.

Another feature you could use, is iCloud Photo Sharing. You'll need a second email address, to share the images with yourself. However, as soon as the albums you create and share with yourself in Sharing are deleted from one device, they'll also disappear on your other devices. Photo Sharing uses part of your iPhone's storage space as well, afaik.

Other options to free up storage space, would be to upload your images to online storage, like Google, OneDrive and Dropbox, to name just a few. After loading the images to one of those, you can remove them from your iPhone. You can access them in the apps, and if you mark some of them as favourites, it's even possible to view them offline (marking them as favourite will load the photos to your iPhone, thus taking storage space on your device).

DrumsOfGrohl · May 17, 2016

J. A. said:
iCloud Photo Library works the way you've experienced it, and there's no setting to change it's behaviour.
There's one feature that can help with your storage space:
In Settings - Photos & Camera, select Optimize iPhone Storage. When you're low on space, iCloud will put optimized versions of images and videos to your iPhone, while it will save the full resolutions versions in iCloud.

Another feature you could use, is iCloud Photo Sharing. You'll need a second email address, to share the images with yourself. However, as soon as the albums you create and share with yourself in Sharing are deleted from one device, they'll also disappear on your other devices. Photo Sharing uses part of your iPhone's storage space as well, afaik.

Other options to free up storage space, would be to upload your images to online storage, like Google, OneDrive and Dropbox, to name just a few. After loading the images to one of those, you can remove them from your iPhone. You can access them in the apps, and if you mark some of them as favourites, it's even possible to view them offline (marking them as favourite will load the photos to your iPhone, thus taking storage space on your device).

'Tis as I feared. I've already optimized my iphone storage.
I know about the other photo sharing apps, but I'm not the biggest fan of them. I guess they'll have to do though. Thanks @J. A.