How to clear icloud storage without deleting photos

• To delete photos from iCloud on your synced iPhone, just open the Photos app and delete them.
• You can also delete photos from iCloud on the iCloud website.
• To delete photos on iCloud but not on your iPhone, you'll have to turn off iCloud Photos syncing.

iCloud might not be a feature you think about very often, but its automatic backups of your most important data makes it an incredibly powerful tool.

If enabled, every photo and video you take on your iPhone or iPad is automatically copied to iCloud. Consequently, you might sometimes need to delete some of those images to free up iCloud storage.

There are two ways to delete photos from your iCloud storage.

How to delete photos from iCloud

If you want to delete a single photo or a small selection of photos that are synced to iCloud from your device, you can do that easily using the Photos app. Note, however, that this will delete them from your device too.

Open the Photos app and find the photo you want to delete, then:

• To delete a single photo, tap and hold the image until the pop-up menu appears, then tap Delete.
• To delete several photos at once, tap Select at the top right of the screen, then tap each photo you want to remove. When you're done, tap the trash can icon at the bottom-right of the screen.

How to delete photos from iCloud but not iPhone

What if you want to delete photos from iCloud — just a few, or all of them — without also removing them from your iPhone or iPad?

If the iCloud Photos feature is turned on, you can't do this because everything stays in sync. But you can delete photos from iCloud without affecting your devices if you turn off iCloud Photos syncing.

How to turn off iCloud Photo syncing

1. Open the Settings app on one of your devices. 

2. Scroll down and tap Photos.

3. Tap the toggle for iCloud Photos to turn it off – it will go from having a green background to a gray one.

4. In the pop-up, tap Remove from iPhone if you want to delete the low-resolution copies of the photos from your iPhone – the originals will still remain on iCloud. If you want to restore the original photos to the iPhone, tap Download Photos & Videos.

5. Repeat this for any other iOS devices connected to that Apple ID account. Once iCloud Photos is turned off, each of your devices' photo collections will be managed individually.

How to delete multiple photos at once from iCloud 

1. Open iCloud.com in a browser and sign in with your Apple ID if needed.

2. Click Photos.

3. Hold the Ctrl key on PC or the Command key on Mac and click on each photo you want to delete. If you want to select all the photos, press Ctrl + A on PC or Command + A on Mac. Keep in mind that you can only select up to 1000 photos at a time.

4. Click the trash bin icon in the top right part of the page to delete the photos.

Dave Johnson

Freelance Writer

Dave Johnson is a technology journalist who writes about consumer tech and how the industry is transforming the speculative world of science fiction into modern-day real life. Dave grew up in New Jersey before entering the Air Force to operate satellites, teach space operations, and do space launch planning. He then spent eight years as a content lead on the Windows team at Microsoft. As a photographer, Dave has photographed wolves in their natural environment; he's also a scuba instructor and co-host of several podcasts. Dave is the author of more than two dozen books and has contributed to many sites and publications including CNET, Forbes, PC World, How To Geek, and Insider.

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Scenario

What to do if my iCloud storage is full?

I have used my iPhone 8 for 3 years. I like to use it to take pictures and have taken many beautiful pictures, but I got a message saying my iCloud is full? What should I do?

- Question from discussion.apple.com

Why my iCloud is full?

iCloud is a powerful cloud storage device, enabling Apple users to upload their photos, videos, notes, documents, and other data to their iCloud storage. Apart from protecting their important data from loss, users can also access their files from different Apple products with the same Apple account.

However, iCloud only provides 5GB of free space for each user. That is totally not enough for our daily life and you may receive a message saying iCloud backup failed due to not enough space on iCloud. When the storage problem arises, you could do something to fix it, like deleting the repeating pictures, clearing unnecessary applications, or transferring data to a PC to release storage. 5 solutions would be introduced in the following passage.

4 Tips to free up iCloud storage when iCloud storage is full

Before we get started, you should know that delete iCloud data will also remove them from other devices enabled iCloud. So you may delete these data completely, please backup your iPhone to a PC to avoid data loss.

• Solution 1. Manage/delete unnecessary iCloud data

• Solution 2. Delete files on iCloud drive

• Solution 3. Delete redundant photos

• Solution 4. Delete messages

• Solution 5. Delete mails with attachments

• Bonus tip: Backup iPhone before clean iCloud to prevent data loss

Solution 1. Manage/delete iCloud data

When you find your iCloud is running out of space, the first thing you can do is to check your storage and manage data on it. Here are the steps of how to check iCloud storage.

Step 1. Go to iPhone “Setting” on your iPhone or iPad.

Step 2. Tap “[Your Name]” banner > “iCloud” > “Manage Storage”.

Step 3. Here you can check specific backups information, and you can tap an item that takes up a large space, and choose “Disable & Delete” to release space.

But sometimes, you may notice that your iCloud is still full even though you delete some data. It is probably because iCloud still holds backups of your old iOS devices.

To delete those files, you can tap “Backups” when you enter iCloud storage on Settings. Choose a device name. Then You could see the backup size, the time of the last backup, and so on. Below is the app data that is going to be included in the iCloud backup. You could unselect the unneeded ones to reduce your backup size.

If you don’t want to disable iCloud and delete all data backup, you can follow the solutions below to delete some redundant files as you want.

Solution 2. Delete files on iCloud Drive

Besides syncing the app’s data, iCloud also enables you to upload some files, such as Word documents, PDFs, Audios. You may use this feature a lot and don't have regular cleanup. Your iCloud space could be easily run out. You can remove some files on iCloud Drive.

1. Tap the “Files” app on your iPhone or iPad.

2. Select “iCloud Drive“ under the “Locations”.

3. Tap and hold a file that you want to delete, and choose “Delete“

Solution 3. Delete redundant photos on iCloud

Photos and videos usually take up the majority of the space, so if your iCloud storage is full, you can delete some redundant photos. With iCloud photos enabled, you can directly delete some pictures to free up iCloud photos if you don’t want to completely turn off iCloud Photos. And the deletion will be synced to the iCloud.

Part 1. Remove Recently Deleted photos

When you delete photos, these photos will be not removed from your device and iCloud but removed to a Recently Delete album. You can delete them by yourself.

Step 1. You can go to the “Photos” app on your iPhone, and find some photos you don’t need anymore, tap them. Then tap the “Trash” icon.

Step 2. Then it will note you “This photo will be deleted from iCloud Photos on all your devices.” Tap “Delete Photo”.

Step 3. The deleted photo actually will be sent to the Recently Deleted album instead of deleted permanently. Then tap the “Albums” tab on the Photos app.

Step 4. Wipe down, and select “Recently Deleted”, you can see deleted photos in the last month. Select them and delete them.

Part 2. Delete duplicate and similar photos

When you take photos, you may take the shutter several times to capture the best moment. But you will also get lots of duplicate and similar images on your iCloud. 

If your iCloud and device don't contain many photos,  you can delete them manually. Or you can turn to a professional photos Deduplication tool- FoneTool. With this tool, you can easily find and delete duplicate photos on iPhone/iCloud. 

Solution 4. Remove Messages

Message is a common tool helping us communicate with friends. After years of use, you could have several GB of message kept both on your iPhone and iCloud. Here are the steps of deleting messages on the iPhone.

1. Tap the “Messages” app on your iPhone. Then choose “All Messages”.

2. You can slide a message leftward and tap the “Trash” icon to delete a conversation.

Solution 5. Delete Mails with attachments

We often receive mails with attachments that can occupy lots of storage space of iCloud. Deleting some Mail that contains attachments can be the way to release iCloud storage.

To delete Mail Attach, go to “Mail” > tap “View” > Choose “Sort by Attachments”. Then delete the mail with attachments.

Bonus Tip: Backup iPhone before cleaning iCloud to prevent data loss

It is an effective way to delete some iCloud data when the storage is almost full. However, iCloud usually store lots of important data that we never want to lose, like photos, videos of friends or families. So, before cleaning up iCloud, we strongly suggest you to backup your iPhone data to a PC or an external disk, USB drive.

To perform this operation, FoneTool can also help you. With this tool, you can easily backup your iPhone data, including photos, videos, messages, contacts, and other data from your iPhone to another safe place

● Easily Backup: You could see all the features clearly on the interface and easily finish backup. It could be used to back up photos, videos, music, messages, and contacts.
● Preview Files: Whenever you back up or restore your phone, you could preview and select the files you need to avoid saving useless photos.
● Flexible Selection: For example, when you back up photos, you can select just some of them rather than the entire folder and you could also do this when restoring your phone. It allows you to restore files to another Apple device including iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
● Widely Compatible: It supports most iPhone models from iPhone 4 to the latest iPhone 14 and would be perfectly compatible with the latest iOS 16.

Step 1. Download FoneTool for free. Connect iPhone to a computer with a USB cable and tap "Trust" on it.

Step 2. Click Phone Backup and go to Selective Backup.

Step 3. Click an icon to select files in the folder if you need them. If you want to backup iPhone photos,  please click Photos. After selection, click on OK.

Step 3. Click Start Backup and your backup would be saved to PC.

Tips:

1. Please make sure the data is stored in the iPhone or iPad.

2. FoneTool also provides Full Backup to backup the whole iPhone.

Conclusion

There are many solutions when iCloud storage is full. In conclusion, you can disable an app to use iCloud and delete its data to release space. No matter what methods you are using, please backup your iOS data in a safe place to prevent data loss.

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