welcome back everyone my name is joel feld and today's video is how not to use icloud
yep you heard that right how not to use icloud let's rock and roll
so i often run into conversations and questions from people asking about icloud and
the frustration that sometimes lies with the use of icloud in general whether it's on their iphone
ipad apple computer it doesn't matter but icloud tends to be either something that you love or
that you hate now i think for the most part we have to truly understand what icloud is and how
it benefits the use of all of our devices and understanding the pros and the cons from it
when it comes down to it icloud is nothing more than a syncing service it synchronizes content
from one device like my iphone to another device like an ipad or a third device like my computer
so for example if i take a photograph here let's take a picture of my flash drive
which i absolutely love if i take a photograph here it's going to automatically show up on my
ipad and my computer because that's what icloud does it's a synchronizing service
you do something on one device and it automatically sends it to another now
that same exact photo if i delete it it's also going to delete it everywhere because that's what
it's designed to do it's a syncing service now icloud is more than just photos and videos though
it's really a lot of different things on your device so let's start with the phone
here if i go into the settings and touch at the very top where it has my name apple id icloud
media and purchases and then here is where i have about halfway down where it says icloud
so this is all of the information that has the ability to synchronize within icloud we have
photos mail contacts calendars reminders notes messages and the list goes on and on and on and
on and on and on the options at the bottom will vary depending on what apps you have installed
but all of this that's turned on if it's turned on it means that it's going to synchronize that
information to another device like my ipad or my computer so for example notes if i create a
note on here because that's turned on when i go to my computer that note is also there that's
the purpose of icloud it's designed to synchronize stuff now here's where most people get frustrated
and i get frustrated too actually and this is because icloud only gives you five gigabytes
of free storage now granted it's free so that's that's nice but five gigabytes of storage space
in the cloud is really useless for the majority of things especially if you're dealing with photos
and videos and that's where people get frustrated i will say that the dollar a month that apple
charges i mean it's a dollar a month you really can't go wrong but some people don't want to pay
any more to apple than than they want to and i totally get that just know that when you have
a phone or a computer or an ipad and we'll stick with the phone as the example when we have this
phone and the storage capacity of this phone is let's say 64 gigabytes or 128 the more content
and pictures that you take here it means that it's gonna fill up that five gigabytes in icloud
really really fast and your information is not going to start synchronizing to your other devices
nor would that content be backed up if something happened to this device so that's why that's the
purpose of icloud is to synchronize content as well as have a backup and a safety net for you
now if you use icloud photos it is not actually backed up for the photos and videos in your backup
but it is stored in the cloud that if something happened to this phone i could go to another phone
sign in with my icloud and all my stuff is there so let's just say you're still not convinced yet
i still don't want to use it and you just want to turn it off well number one you could just sign
out of icloud you could go into the settings here and i could choose sign out down at the bottom
type in my password and then all of that information is going to be wiped off my phone
all of that information is going to be wiped off my phone so that means your emails from icloud
your contacts your calendars your reminders your notes your text messages your safari bookmarks all
of these options that are currently toggled on i should say if you have them toggled on if you
sign out of icloud down at the bottom yes you're not using icloud in theory but that content is
now disappeared from this device naturally most people don't want that and the reason you wouldn't
want that is number one the information would be gone but then if something happened to this device
it only lives on this device you have no other safety net unless you're taking this device and
physically plugging it into a computer that's the benefit of icloud now let's say that you want to
partially sync some content so that's where you just toggle on what you want and what you don't
want so if you don't use notes if you don't use reminders turn that off if you don't care that to
have that content synchronized from this iphone to your computer then you can just take it and toggle
the reminders off and now if i add a reminder on this phone it's not going to go to my ipad
and it's not going to go to my computer it's as simple as that now all of these options usually
aren't the huge concern where it comes into a concern is the photos and videos and because
that takes up so much space so if i touch photos i have icloud photos here and this is again where it
synchronizes all of the content to icloud so if i take a picture here that picture shoots up to
icloud.com icloud then shoots that photograph to the computer or ipad or any other device
that i'm signed in with that icloud account now if i were to turn icloud photos off here
that means that as soon as i take a picture it's not going to go to my computer it's not
going to go to icloud it's not going to come to my ipad because i've turned it off on this device
but if i went to my ipad and took a photograph because i have icloud photos turned on on my ipad
that picture from my ipad is going to go up to icloud and it's going to also come to my computer
so if something happened to my ipad at least my computer has it and at
least icloud has it as well but if something happened to my phone after i turn this off
then i lose that information forever now sometimes you're in the environment though when you have a
shared device maybe the kids all share an ipad you have family members that share a computer which if
you share a computer you should have separate user accounts on there because they can all synchronize
their own icloud account but needless to say if you're sharing devices and you want to completely
not have any of your text messages or any of your photos or videos or any of your content number
one you probably don't want any of this turned on because that's the purpose of it you want to
keep that secure and only for your use so these little toggle options allow you to to do that
if i want to completely disable the synchronizing amongst all of my devices specifically to photos
if i go to manage storage and i go to photos i have the option here to disable and delete
now what that's going to do is it's going to tell icloud to tell every single device to stop
using icloud photos it's going to just say stop it's going to say you have 30 days to export and
save your content of photos and videos out of icloud and then poof they're all magically gone
and if they haven't fully downloaded on your phone if they haven't fully downloaded on your ipad
if they're not fully downloaded on your computer and you haven't gotten them backed up or from
icloud.com they are all gone so when you disable it it disables it everywhere and it even says if
you want to stop using icloud photos and recover your icloud storage you can disable it on all of
your devices then you'll have 30 days to download your photos now if i take a step back we need to
look at the options that says optimize iphone storage because most of the time people will
turn on icloud photos and optimize iphone storage because you're going to get a notification on your
phone saying hey your storage is almost filled up you can free up space on your device by syncing
to icloud so when optimized iphone storage is turned on what it does is it synchronizes all
of your photos and videos to icloud but then only keeps the low resolution of your photos
and videos on your phone until you touch it then it downloads a high resolution version
so that the high quality is there but photos that you don't look at often are a lower quality taking
up less space and that's kind of the whole premise behind there for me i do a lot of photography
and i have probably 30 40 000 photos in my photo library now that equates to almost 500 gigabytes
of content but my ipad is only a 64 gigabyte therefore when i optimize the storage i have
access to scroll through all my photographs but i'm not touching on every single one to download
the full quality i'm optimizing the space because i still want to see those pictures
but i'm not actually doing anything with them it's more of a gallery for my purpose so what i mean
by this is because this is set to optimize iphone storage on my phone if i went back to that managed
storage setting and chose photos and i chose disable and delete it's going to say hey some
of your photos stored on icloud are not downloaded to this phone do you want to continue anyways i'm
going to say yeah that's fine because i know they're not physically on here so all of those
photos now are going to be gone or are gonna start to disappear from my phone and in a second here my
iphone or my ipad and my computer are all going to start getting a message saying hey uh icloud
photos is disabled oop notice right here icloud photos disabled on my computer and i can choose
to manage and it says photos and videos will be deleted from icloud in 29 days so i've 30 days to
get my photos there if i go out to icloud itself so let's open up safari let's go to icloud.com
and this is where that cloud is i have my email from icloud i have my contacts my calendars
photos icloud drive notes reminders all of that content is directly here in icloud
and if i click on photos notice at the top it even says icloud photos has been
disabled you have 30 days remaining to have a complete copy of your photos and videos i can
click on learn more and it's actually going to show me a help article of how
icloud works and what to do to download my copies from the pictures and to download
them you can select the files here and there's a little cloud button that allows you to download
at the top right and that will download that video and or photograph to your computer now if you have
photos on your computer i wouldn't have to do this step if within photos under preferences
i've told it to download the originals to this mac because if i click on this option here that's
going to save me a lot of time from going out to icloud and individually downloading all of those
files separately so this will actually do it for me by clicking that download originals to this mac
notice down here at the bottom it says downloading 414 originals so now after 30 days those pictures
are only going to be on this computer here they're only going to be on my iphone here they're only
going to be on my ipad and if i take a photo here it stays here it's not going anywhere else
that's just with photos that's the only thing i turned off if i go back to icloud itself
i still have these other options to be turned on and synchronized like messages or notes so really
you have to make a judgment call and and decide what you actually want to use icloud for and
if the main goal is to say nope i don't want to use any of it then honestly you would go back
to the main icloud setting and you come down to the bottom and just sign out sign out of icloud
in general and that way it's going to be completely disconnected and all of the content on
there is only going to be on that device it's only going to be on this phone so that's pretty much
the different ways to not use icloud and all of the settings everything that we looked at on the
phone is identical to what's on an ipad and if we go to the system preferences back on my mac it's
the same pretty much here if we go to apple id i have icloud and it's the same kind of content here
so i personally enjoy using icloud i spend money to have additional content or to have additional
storage i actually use family storage so everyone in my family all six of us actually combined
the same storage it's not combined in the sense where we all see each other's content it's still
separate but having that ability to pay once for everyone really is helpful and if i wanted
to not use it though on my computer here if i uncheck these boxes it's doing the same thing
as toggling the switches on my phone and if i want to completely stop using icloud on the
computer also i would click on overview here and then i can choose sign out in the bottom as well
so that's pretty much icloud that's the purpose of icloud it's a synchronizing service
and often people it's it's actually funny a lot of people will say well i'll just use google because
i don't want to pay well google makes you pay also and google isn't intertwined into the iphone
like it is with android phones so yes you can use google and you can use backup and sync and you
can synchronize your photos and content from your iphone to google but it's not as seamless and you
still have to pay for more storage because you're going to fill it up same thing with microsoft
so long story short icloud is a great service it's more about understanding
the pros of it versus just looking at the price tag and saying why do i need this i
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