Photos and iCloud

[Elrich]

Recently I decided to switch from automatically uploading photos from my iPhone 12 mini (iOS 16.4.1 (a)) to Dropbox, to uploading them to iCloud.

All the photos from my phone uploaded and filled up my free 5GB on iCloud. The photos are still on my phone as well. But I have copies of all these photos from the Dropbox backup, stored away on an external hard drive, so I want the photos on my phone to just be ones I'd like to refer back to, show people, etc. For various reasons, there are a lot of near-identical photos in the batch that could be deleted.

iCloud photos on my phone is set to "Download and Keep Originals." "Shared Albums" is on, although I'm not sharing with anyone else.

My question is, to thin out the collection of photos in order to free up iCloud storage space, should I delete them from my phone? Will iCloud automatically delete the same photos? Or should I delete them from iCloud via the browser on my Mac? Will deleting from iCloud automatically delete the same photos from my phone?

 

[Elrich]

I called Apple today and got this sorted out. iCloud works differently from Dropbox, they said -- if I photo is deleted from either place, iCloud or my phone, it will disappear from the other place as well. Makes it difficult to use this the way I wanted to!