Everything Everywhere - One Delete To Rule Them All

Deleting photos from your iPhone deletes them on all your iCloud synced devices

To delete, or not to delete

Every few days I hear or read about someone who wants to delete photos from their iPhone to save space. These are not totally unwanted photos, mind you, but extras that would have been moved from album to shoebox back in the day. To make room for new ones. 

Here’s the thing. If you use the Apple ecosystem as it’s designed, deleting a picture from Photos on your iPhone will delete that photo everywhere. From your Mac, from your iPad, from anything that’s synced to the iCloud Photo Library. Because the whole idea that Apple developed is to make it really easy to get at your photos wherever you are. Everything everywhere.

Stash a copy elsewhere, then delete

People may talk about iCloud as a backup service, but it’s really a sync service, keeping all your photos the same everywhere. And for those pictures that you really DO want to delete, the system is very handy. You can clean up your iPhone by culling out pictures on your Mac, for instance. All your devices will get that same treatment too. 

So if you have “seconds” that are just taking up space but you don’t want to lose them forever, just share them to a folder outside of the main Photos library and THEN delete them from your library to save that space. There are many ways to manage your photo collection without losing memories that you may want someday.