Your Photos, everywhere!
It’s like an album that follows you around, but less creepy than that probably sounds
Taking photos is easy; finding them later is hard. iCloud solves it by keeping all the photos you take on any of your Apple devices and syncing them to the others. So you can show off the pictures you’ve taken with your iPhone on your iPad, Mac or Apple TV. Albums you create appear everywhere with the same photos in them. You can share photos around your family, too (see page 26).
When iCloud Photos (previously iCloud Photo Library) is activated on a device, every item added to All Photos – primarily by shooting stills or video in the Camera app – is copied to iCloud. This happens immediately if the device is online, or next time it connects. The copies sync to all your other devices with iCloud Photos on. Equally, when you delete an item in Photos, it’s deleted from iCloud and all your other devices.
Read that part twice! You can’t delete pics to save space while keeping them in iCloud – that’s not how it works. Instead,
in Settings > User > iCloud > Photos, choose Optimise iPhone Storage (not Download and Keep Originals) to keep only previews of photos and videos on your device. The versions in iCloud stay at the full original quality, and download when you open them, if the device is online. Raw photos (which you can shoot with recent iPhones using some thirdparty apps, or import from a digital camera) are also preserved in iCloud, and available to edit on iPad or Mac, but otherwise display as JPEG previews.
Original sync
Keep the Photos app on your Mac set to Download Originals, in Photos > Preferences > iCloud, and you’ll always have full-quality copies on your Mac storage as well as in iCloud. (Your Photos Library is also backed up by Time Machine.) The same iCloud rules apply, so if you delete a photo elsewhere it’ll disappear from your Mac, and vice versa. Photos stored on your Mac, but not in Photos, are ignored by iCloud; if you want some photos to appear in Photos, but not iCloud, use the workaround in steps 5 and 6 on the opposite page.
When you edit a photo in the Photos app, and iCloud Photos is on, you’ll see the edited version everywhere. Edits are non-destructive, though, so you can open the item in Photos on any device and tap Edit, then simply Revert to remove the changes everywhere.