iCloud storage full was the message that I kept seeing pop up on my PC so I decided to do something about it and follow the steps from an article that I had read on another blog, and although I did reduce my storage back down to a manageable size I could not get the iCloud photo stream to function properly on my Windows 10 PC.
Any new photos that I took were just not being transferred to my designated folder in my iCloud for Windows on my PC, I decided to turn my iCloud Photo Library back on and hey presto the new photo’s that I had taken since it was turned off appeared in my iPhone Downloaded Photo’s folder and also in my iCloud account on the web but now my storage had gone back up to almost full again so I was at back at square one. But at least I had my photo’s where I wanted them, on my PC.
This got me thinking about buying extra iCloud storage and do I really need to pay out a small fee every month forever when I have a PC with almost a terabyte of storage and a network attached storage device with 3 terabytes of storage available that cost me only the initial purchase price, no I don’t need to buy extra storage was the reply that I got.
I then sat down on my PC and oiled up my rusty brain cogs and thought hard about what happens when you take a photo on your iPhone, in case that you don’t know, as soon as you click the camera shutter on your iPhone the photo is available in the photo app on your iPhone, also as soon as you connect to WiFi it is uploaded and available in your iCloud account on the web and as soon as you switch on your PC it is there in your downloaded iPhone Photo’s folder on your hard drive, provided that you have iCloud for Windows installed on your PC and have a folder selected for your iPhone photo’s.
If you then delete the photo from either your iPhone or your iCloud account it is not deleted but moved to a folder on your iPhone and iCloud account called “Recently Deleted”, where it will stay for thirty days until it is deleted permanently, but the photo will stay permanently in your Downloaded iPhone Photo’s folder on your PC’s hard drive.
Once the photo has landed in my Downloaded iPhone Photo’s folder it is also backed up to my network attached storage device so I now have at least two copies of all my photo’s and have little chance of losing them. Remember that you should always be backing up your data.
You can also download your photo’s manually by logging in to your iCloud account on your PC, or any PC with a web browser, go to your photo’s, select the photo’s that you want and download them to any folder that you want to, by doing this you will be keeping your photo’s permanently on your PC’s hard drive, after you have manually downloaded them you can then delete the photo’s from your iCloud account thus freeing up storage in your iCloud account, but remember this will also remove the photo’s from your iPhone.
At the time of writing I have 882 photo’s taking up 2.1gb of storage space on my iPhone and in my iCloud account so you can see that the photo’s are counting towards almost half of my 5gb free allowance in my iCloud account. Provided that you have your photo’s on your hard drive and backed up you can delete photo’s from your iPhone in order to keep your storage to below 5gb, some people like to carry photo’s with them and as you can see there is ample space to carry at least 1000 photo’s should you wish to do so.
Now you can see how I have solved my iCloud Storage Full problem just by understanding how it all works and taking some precautions so as to not lose any of my precious photographs and without paying for extra storage.
I would like to know if you have had a problem with your iCloud storage and what you have done to resolve it, so please feel free to leave your comments below.
