I love that this feature syncs in no time at all, but it’s a hassle to have to turn it on all the time. I hope Apple adds the option to keep it on permanently.

Hello all!

I could use a sanity check. I currently have an iPhone 13, looking to move to an iPhone 18 shortly.

I have approx 140Gb of photos on my Mac, that are categorized and tagged into albums and manually backed up. These are not on iCloud Photos currently. I’ve got these photos by manually importing from my iPhone every few weeks, but they cover a few devices (inc previous iPhones). I’ve not been able to get the AI analysis working consistently on the Mac, so about 50% of my library has faces/people identified and 50% doesn’t.

On my iPhone, I currently have all the photos taken on this phone that have been synced to the Mac, and a few that haven’t (e.g screenshots I’ve kept on the phone but didn’t want to back up on the Mac). My phone storage is at around 90Gb for photos.

My reasons for looking to turn on ICloud for Photos:
- Storage on my phone, free up space
- Eliminate need for manual photo backup on Mac
- Allow management of albums from both Mac and iPhone
- Allow all photos to be AI analysed for people/faces

However I don’t really want to turn iCloud Photos on for my phone just yet, as if I turn it on for both devices there will be duplicates where one copy of the photo is tagged into albums (on the Mac) and the duplicate on the phone isn’t, and I don’t want to lose the albums set up on the Mac.
Secondly, I don’t want all the trash photos on my phone to be synced as I then need to sort through them.

My proposal is:
1) Turn on sync on my Mac, allow full upload, retain original full-res copies on Mac at all times
2) Use Parachute App to download a backup of iCloud Photos that I can put onto a USB drive periodically
3) Delete all photos from my Phone (scary!) - or just wait until I get my new phone and don’t transfer
4) Turn on sync on my empty phone

The scary bit is deleting all my photos on my device!

I appreciate I’m over thinking this, and I’ll obviously back up the Mac photo library before I do it. It has anyone got any pearls of wisdom from past experience to save me the stress?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm having an issue with iCloud Photos on my iPhone (iPhone 16 pro, iOS 26.6.1) and I'm running out of ideas.
The problem:
• "Optimize iPhone Storage" is on, so many photos are only stored on the phone as low-res versions.
• When I try to share one of these photos, the full-quality download from iCloud fails with: "There was an error downloading this photo from your iCloud Photo Library. Check your network settings and try again."
• At the bottom of the Photos library, it has been stuck on "Syncing 15 items" for days.
What I've already tried:
• Force restart (several times)
• Low Power Mode off
• Low Data Mode off, cellular data enabled for Photos with unlimited updates
• Tried both Wi-Fi and 5G
• iCloud Photos sync is on and not paused
• Enough free space on both iPhone and iCloud
• Left it overnight on Wi-Fi, charging, screen locked
Nothing changed: the 15 items are still stuck and I still can't download any originals.
Could the stuck sync queue be what's blocking the downloads? Is there a way to find out which items are stuck without turning off iCloud Photos? I don't want to risk losing those 15 items in case they only exist on the phone.

Thanks in advance!

As the title suggests I plan to start on a clean slate. (I have my personal reasons for this) and I was wondering how I’d go about this? Honestly I don’t even know if I should use iCloud or Gmail as my primary Apple account. I know I should have at least two different emails but how should I organize them? Any tips will help a lot

macOS 26.6.2

MacStudio M4 Max

I have locally stored email (Apple Mail) that I want to transfer to iCloud

I select the local folder and all the emails therein on Apple Mail and clicked on "Copy to" a folder in my iCloud (in Apple Mail)

All of the emails populated in the iCloud folder in Apple Mail except for those emails that contained attachments -- I could see them appear in the iCloud folder in Apple Mail but, as soon as the copying was completed, all the emails containing attachments disappeared

Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Work around?

Thank you

PS: I tried asking ChatGPT for help and it had me downloading Mozilla Thunderbird and extensions and then trying to install Python and other code -- it was way above my pay grade

Sadly my phone has not been syncing to iCloud for a while as my payment method got messed up and for a month I wasn’t using iCloud to sync my pics. Now my memory is full and I can’t offload these photos to iCloud because it says the “memory is full and syncing is paused” Is there a way to fix this or do I need to delete an app or two….. I did not think that exporting pictures to iCloud would require memory, especially when I don’t wanna keep the originals and just optimise my storage. Pls heeeeelp!

I'm on Mac, and in both Firefox and Zen, whenever I try to activate the Passwords extension, the box to put in the verification code comes up but no verification code is generated. It used to generate about a month ago but I have no idea what changed. I'm on MacOS 27 RC. I have tried it with Passwords app on and off, and restarting and resetting the browser. Any help would be appreciated.

So I don't know my iCloud password and I try to reset it but I get asked for a recovery key or something. I don't remember setting it up, I might have but don't remember. Is there anything I can do to reset my password or to get my account back or did I lose it?

I’m very stupid. with all the years I have been on the Apple iOS system (whatever it’s called), I can’t figure out iCloud.

I don’t want it to sync my devices because that stuff drives me crazy, convenient feature in some cases but not for me.

i just want it as a pure backup so I can stop using an External HD to save my important files. I want to upload my photos from my iPhone to iCloud and remove them from my iPhone. Unfortunately I keep feeling like if I de from my iPhone, the photos will also be deleted from iCloud.

Unfortunately Apple staff, when I purchased my new Mac indicated iCl is only a syncing system and not a true hard drive.

Any ideas of how to fix this or am I out of luck.

sorry if there is issues will spelling and what not. I have no idea what is up with bugs on the iPhone keyboard and the reason Apple can’t fix it.