iCloud Photos’ mission is to sync photos and video across all your devices, providing access to a single set of media across your hardware and via iCloud.com. Not everybody wants that, however. Some people want different sets of media on different devices. That’s possible, but it comes with risk and challenges.
If you don’t have iCloud Photos already set up, you can skip ahead to the section on backing up media without using iCloud.
Switching from iCloud Photos to locally stored media
If iCloud Photos is enabled on one or more of your devices—that’s on any iPhone or Mac—some copy of your entire set of images and movies are on each device. When Optimize iPhone Storage is turned on, all your full‑resolution photos and videos are stored in iCloud in their original formats, with storage-saving versions kept on your iPhone.
You can check whether Optimize iPhone/Mac Storage is enabled in these locations:
- In iOS, go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Photos > iPhone Storage
- In macOS, open Photos and go to Photos > Settings > iCloud.
If your set of synced media is optimized, then you don’t have a full-resolution version of all images and videos on that device. Make sure one of your devices does (most likely a Mac), and that it has enough storage to download the full library. The easiest method is to force Photos to perform a download:
- In Photos for macOS, go to Photos > Settings > iCloud.
- If you don’t have Download Originals to this Mac checked, do so. This will start a full download.
- Uncheck the iCloud Photos box.
- Photos prompts you to confirm, but offers two choices. Pick Download, which ensures that all images in any state are downloaded to your Mac.
When the operation is complete, iCloud Photos will be disabled and you’ll have a full local copy.
I’d suggest waiting until that point before you disable iCloud Photos on devices that you don’t want to continue syncing with and via iCloud.
Your media remains on iCloud.com as a backup even if you disable all devices from syncing with it. But it’s no longer kept up to date with any device that has iCloud Photos disabled.
Before you downgrade or cancel your iCloud+ plan, download or remove content that exceeds your new storage amount. If your iCloud storage exceeds your new storage plan capacity, iCloud won’t sync or update your information.
On devices that no longer have iCloud Photos enabled, any images you capture or add to the Photos library are retained only locally. If you don’t use iCloud Photos, your Photos Library is part of your iCloud Backup.
Backing up photos without iCloud sync
Your photos and videos are likely some of the most precious things you own, even if they only exist as bits on a computer or mobile device. Once you disable iCloud Photos on your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max, images aren’t necessarily automatically backed up the moment they’re captured or added.
On an iPhone, you have to engage a bit more effort:
- Sync via a Mac: You can use the Photos app to import images from your iPhone to your Mac. This is manual, so these backups occur only when you physically connect your mobile device via USB to your Mac.
- Sync via Google Photos: Google can automatically sync photos with Google Photos installed without occupying much storage on your device. (This is also an option for macOS.) Google’s storage prices aren’t far off from Apple’s.
- Sync via Dropbox: Dropbox can automatically sync images from an iPhone using an app on the device or when you plug in a mobile device (or camera) to a Mac. Dropbox also charges about the same as Apple for cloud storage.
