iPhone and iCloud are caught in a loop
Scotty, I updated all devices. I deleted the iCloud backup from the
️. Regarding hard drive storage, my iMac has 32 gigs of photos. MacBook Pro has 18 gigs of photos. iPad Pro has 15 gigs of photos. iPhone has over 600 gigs, which seems to be the issue.I have Photos set to optimize on all devices, but all goes back to the original issue of the photos refusing to sync and convert to optimize on my phone.
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So you’d want to tread carefully here. Based on the information you’ve provided, it sounds like the problem is a communications loop of some sort between the phone and the cloud, specifically regarding pictures. In a normal situation, your iCloud space tells you exactly how much space is being used for your full resolution pictures and videos but the other devices have the option to “optimize” or abbreviate the resolution, therefore taking less space. For example, an average person in their 40’s might have 100 gigs of pics and video that sits permanently in the cloud but that space would be optimized down to say 8 gigs of space on the other devices.
I sent out an email about this topic a couple months ago where I mentioned I prefer that people who have enough hard drive space, store their pictures on at least one computer in full rez versions. In your case, keeping the originals downloaded on your iMac would be useful here. However, you mentioned that optimized is turned on on your iMac. If that is the case, we need to think this through a bit more. This would mean that the only place your pictures truly are would be in the cloud. And even in the cloud, they’re screwed up because of the communication problem between iPhone and cloud. This means we wouldn’t have a current reliable copy of your pictures to start over from.
This best way to move forward would be to first: make a backup of your photos regardless of the mess they’re in. The way one would do this would be to ensure there’s enough hard drive space either on the entire iMac drive or by pointing Photos to an external, then restarting with a new library on the iMac set to Originals from the beginning. After many many hours, you’d then have all 600 gigs of messed up photos on a local drive.
Second: After turning off syncing on your computer, you’d delete every photo from the cloud until you have no photos in your life in both the cloud and iOS devices.
Third: you’d make a backup copy of the iMac 600 gig library and then remove duplicates in that library, therefore bringing your library down to the more logical size of around 100 gigs or so.
Fourth: restart photos syncing and the healthy smaller library should now push over to all devices after many hours of reuploading the pictures to iCloud from the iMac.
Above all, you want to make sure you back up copies as you go along so you don’t lose everything. Time Machine doesn’t help a person who only has optimized checked. Time Machine will not back up something that was never there in the first place and iCloud doesn’t make a backup of itself.
Big project ahead it sounds like. But essentially, it seems like the phone and the cloud got into a revolving conversation and just started filling the other up with repetitive data. That’s my guess.
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