welcome back everyone my name is joel feld and today i want to discuss the topic of
storage on icloud for your photos and how it relates to storage on your iphone or your ipad
or your mac computer and identify how much storage you actually need versus how much
storage you think you need in addition to give you a real live example of how i can fit
almost 500 gigabytes worth of photos onto my 64 gigabyte ipad let's rock and roll
i got this question from someone asking on youtube in a comment from alan he said if i
have 500 gigs of photos on my mac how will icloud sync such a library a large library syncing to a
phone which might have 64 gigabyte storage also what percentage of storage is required when you
select optimize mac storage and i have no photo library on my mac and only have 200 gigs left
i sync the original library to icloud photos and deleted it locally because i was always short of
hard drive space is what i'm guessing so this video is going to be perfect we're going to
kind of go through the process and i'm actually i'm like literally in his shoes because i have
roughly 500 gigabytes of photos myself and i have a 64 gig ipad i have a 100 or 256 iphone and i
have that ability to synchronize all of my content amongst all of the devices as long as you have the
icloud storage for it to meet the total amount of pictures you're good to go so let's go ahead and
get started we first have to understand how icloud is designed to work and how it actually does work
if you're using icloud photos you want to make sure that you're signed in and turned on with
the same account on all of your devices because the whole purpose of icloud photos is to keep
all of your devices synchronized and on the same page whether it's your iphone your ipad your mac
any apple product that you have so the example is if i take a photograph on my phone or if i
take a video on my phone it's gonna magically automatically pop up on my computer as well as
my ipad no matter where they're at as long as they have an internet connection it also gives you the
ability to create albums and have it synchronized across all of the devices if you edit a photo it's
going to be edited and shown that edit across all devices but if you also delete a photo it's going
to be deleted from all of the devices as well it's really designed to keep everything on the same
page and keep everything in this cloud environment as well as on your devices so first let's go ahead
and get started let's first show where you want to make sure that you're signed into all of your
devices so that they have icloud enabled and that's set properly so let's start on my mac
i'm going to go ahead and open up photos and i'm going to click on photos and go to the preferences
and i need to go to icloud here and tell it to have this icloud photos this first option checked
if this is not checked that means that you're not including this device
in that ecosystem which means any photos or videos or files that you put into photos here
is not going to sync to your other devices that have this enabled i also have the option
to download the originals or optimize the mac storage where it does not download the originals
so this is part one you want to make sure this is checked the other thing that you
want to make sure is checked on your mac is within system preferences go to your apple id
and you want to make sure that you're signed in with your account and you have photos checked here
as well so by having these two locations you're essentially saying i want to include this photos
into the icloud photos library and it's going to synchronize that content to the cloud also back in
system preferences if you want to know how much space icloud is actually taking up in the cloud
on your mac go back into system preferences go under the apple id under your icloud on the left
here and then choose manage on the bottom right what this does is actually break down
all of the storage that's actually being used in your icloud library in the in the cloud amongst
other items here as well so as you can see i'm right under that 500 gigabyte mark and i can
see that um here right on the mac also keep in mind the same exact settings live on your phone
and ipad under the settings in the same location one other thing is back in the preferences here
and photos if i go back to general you only can synchronize from one computer one system photo
library so the way that this is grayed out that tells me that it's being used as the main library
that's talking to icloud photos from this direct computer i could have a completely different
computer or third computer or fourth computer they could all have the photos library on there and as
long as they're all the system library all three or four of those computers would have the same
exact photos same exact videos organizations so on and so forth because it's the system photo library
that's being used for icloud photos now the next thing that you want to check is your phone
so i'm going to go into the settings on my phone and the first choice is my apple id and i'm going
to choose icloud and go to photos so here the first choice is icloud photos again it's turned
on but the difference between my phone and my computer is on the phone i want to make sure
that i'm optimizing the iphone storage because i don't have the amount of room on this phone
that can actually hold the original high quality resolution of every single photo and video that
i have so essentially what i'm telling it to do is i want to have access to all my photographs
but don't download the high resolution because i don't need them necessarily all of them on
my phone now if i touch a photo it's going to download the high resolution so that it's there
but i have almost 30 000 photos and videos total in my photos library and i don't need every single
one to be high-res on my mobile device and that's also how i can get away with my ipad being a 64
gig if i go into again same thing i go back into the settings i go to icloud settings go to icloud
photos and again i have icloud photos turned on but i'm telling it to optimize the ipad storage
because i don't need all of those photos now the way it works is when i take a picture
let's say i have my my camera here let's take a picture of my microphone here
and the moment that i take a picture of that it's going to automatically synchronize from my phone
up to icloud.com and then icloud.com is going to take it to every single device
that i have icloud photos enabled on so let's take a quick detour let's actually go out to
icloud.com that picture will travel from my iphone up to the cloud after i sign in
if i go to photos i will now have this picture that i took of my microphone right on icloud.com
and if i go to my ipad it'll be the same exact thing if i go to my recents come down to the
bottom here is that exact same photograph you know my icloud library is taking up 492 gigabytes
so it's almost 500 gigabytes of photos and videos total of all of the high resolution images that's
physically on this computer but because i'm telling my mobile devices to be optimized it's
not putting all of the high resolution on there so that gives me the flexibility to have a lower
uh storage size on my mobile device but still have access to all of my content and then keep all of
the raw and original or all of the high-res and original photographs on my computer and so when
i go back to photos here i have that picture here as well as it's synchronized across all devices
and again that's because under the preferences of photos under icloud i've told it to download
all the originals to this mac so store original photos and videos on this mac
choose this option if you want to access full resolution versions of your entire library
even when you're offline so that's the beauty of it i have the the capabilities to have this
computer with a big enough hard drive that can store and download all of my original content and
or all my high resolution and then i can optimize that storage space on my phone and and the beauty
of it too is if i actually go to the settings of my phone you know it's physically taking up
almost 500 gigs 492 whatever it was if i actually go to my phone here and go to general and i found
iphone storage i can see that the storage on my phone of what photos is actually taking up is
12.65 gigabytes so only 12 and a half almost 13 gigabytes is is what's actually being used on
my phone and if i go to my ipad and look at the same exact setting so i'll go to settings general
ipad storage so photos on my ipad 8.64 gigabytes so out of the the 64 gigabyte ipad that i have
i'm only actually using 8.64 of photographs but i have access to all 30 000 uh files that i actually
have in my icloud now a few of the stipulations is number one you need the icloud storage so the
five gigabytes that apple gives you is is useless i mean let's be honest it's useless five gigs is
literally nothing so you are kind of uh forced i'll say forced you're forced to buy more storage
to accommodate your growing library of photos and videos now me personally i pay the 10 a month
currently for the subscription for the family plan where all six of us can actually share that same
data or same storage in the cloud but they've revamped to an apple one subscription plan and
they're kind of restructuring the pricing i don't know if these current plans will go away but
that's another discussion at this point it's really not that expensive is what it comes down
to you're talking 99 cents for i think 50 gigs 299 a month for 200 gigs and then 10 a month for
two terabytes of storage now you don't have to do this now keep in mind no one's forcing you to do
icloud photos if you don't want your photographs to synchronize across all the devices you don't
have to just don't turn on icloud photos and that means your pictures and your and your videos are
not going to synchronize from your iphone to your computer from your ipad to your phone
or vice versa so just don't have any of those settings turned off or turned on i should say
so that's really what it comes down to is knowing those settings having everything on if you want
to use icloud photos having the amount of storage available in the cloud so that you can house all
of your photos it's hard to say they don't really tell you how much storage is going to be needed
for let's say a phone or an ipad that is lower than that that you know 400 gigs i can only go
based off of my own personal experience that with roughly thirty thousand photos that is equivalent
to roughly five hundred gigabytes it's only using you know ten fifteen gigs on my mobile devices
and it's only using that much again because i'm optimizing the storage space and i can go through
and anytime i click on a photo it's going to show me and download that original high quality one
and if let's see if we can actually do that so if i actually go into my ipad and let's
say i go to albums recent let's just travel back in time a little bit it'll swipe through
so notice right there really quick happened in the bottom right hand side the photo is actually
not physically on my ipad until i actually touched it and then it quickly downloads it so
that's where whenever you touch one of those pictures that's when it's downloading that
either video or the high resolution photo and that's why it's optimized you're only seeing
the thumbnail until you actually click on it so long story short this is the way that you can
fit you know 500 gigs worth of photos onto a 64 gigabyte ipad or 128 or i think this is a 256
gigabyte phone so that is pretty much icloud photos and more in depth of
how to get things synchronizing and the settings that you want to look at and how you can really
take advantage of this cloud environment just keep in mind that whenever you're doing this
it will take time if you have a big library like this it can often take weeks to actually
get on the same page so just be patient with it trust the process and know that
when you take a picture if it's not fully synced up it will be there and let it synchronize and
let it do it you'll know it's working when you can take a picture on your phone or your ipad and it
automatically shows up in all of the other places that's kind of the best advice i can give you
again thank you so much for watching i appreciate the support if you liked what you saw go ahead
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