iCloud, 99¢ A month and my 50 gigs. But where is it? (1 Viewer)

[TonyD]

so yeah.
Been paying 99¢ a months for half a dozen or so.

Thinking I don’t need it with this new max 256 iPhone.

I just have no idea where the stuff I saved is. Where is it?

 

[Sam Posten]

A general rule of thumb is that if something is 'in the cloud' it is saved on someone else's hard drive.

You have 41gigs of pictures backed up on Apple's servers. You can easily share them with friends and family if that's your thing.

 

[Clinton McClure]

I don’t back up photos (or really take photos for that matter) so I don’t use much cloud space.

 

[TonyD]

Well I changed it back to 5 and I have 22 gigs on my phone but where are those other 42.6 gbs?

 

[Clinton McClure]

Go to iCloud.com and sign in with your Apple ID and password. See if they are there. Like I posted earlier, I back up the few photos I take locally and don’t upload them to the cloud, so that would be my best guess.

 

[TJPC]

We have stopped taking pictures. For years we enjoyed taking them and later connecting our Windows computer to our iPhone and downloading them to use for slide show screensavers.

Now our iPhone takes pictures, which appear on the phone, but apparently are “in the cloud” (?) and thus somehow not downloadable to our Windows 10 computer. After several tries, we have given up.

 

[JQuintana]

I suggest you download and use Google Photos.

You can load all your pix from the free cloud storage easily to your Windows computer.

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313?co=GENIE.Platform=Desktop&hl=en

 

[DaveF]

so yeah.
Been paying 99¢ a months for half a dozen or so.

Thinking I don’t need it with this new max 256 iPhone.

I just have no idea where the stuff I saved is. Where is it?

It's in the cloud. On Apple's servers (which are likely Microsoft Azure servers).

If you don't have iCloud storage sufficient for all your photos, make sure they are synced back to your home computer, and are backed up to local and or cloud storage from there!

If all your photos are only on your iPhone then (1) you're at risk of losing them if your iPhone dies (dropped, drowned, or bad cable fries the mother board) and (2) for lower capacity models you're at risk of having no room for new photos.


The gray bar is my wife's portion of our iCloud storage. The family account is what really works for me: $1.99 for 200GB shared between us. Even without photo syncing, the 5GB default was too small for my basic use with device backups, messages, etc.

What I struggle with now is whether to have files in iCloud, which is convenient since I can look at them any whatever device is handy, or to have them properly organized and stored on my iMac.

 

[TonyD]

I can easily save everything to my laptop which I know isn’t the cloud.

I finally found my iCloud.
I can’t figure out how to get to it on my iPad and ihphone
but on my laptop I can go to iCloud.com and it’s all there.

I do use Google and Amazon to save my pics.

 

[DaveF]

I don’t understand what you’re trying to do?

If you want to browse your photos, use the Photos app. It will download as needed to show full resolution. If you want to access files, use the relevant app to load them from iCloud Drive. Or use the Files app to browse or arrange your documents.

 

[TonyD]

Initially as I asked in the first post, where is it.
I can’t find it on my iPad and iPhone. I just get a page that tells me to set up iCloud which us already set up.

Had to go to my pc laptop to get iCloud.com to work and then was able to find my iCloud content.

I’m just thinking now despite the danger of the iPhone breaking that I don’t need to pay 99¢ a month to save photos.

 

[DaveF]

We have stopped taking pictures. For years we enjoyed taking them and later connecting our Windows computer to our iPhone and downloading them to use for slide show screensavers.

Now our iPhone takes pictures, which appear on the phone, but apparently are “in the cloud” (?) and thus somehow not downloadable to our Windows 10 computer. After several tries, we have given up.

“How to transfer your iPhone and iPad photos to Windows 10 | iMore”
https://www.imore.com/how-transfer-your-iphone-and-ipad-photos-windows-10

 

[DaveF]

Initially as I asked in the first post, where is it.
I can’t find it on my iPad and iPhone. I just get a page that tells me to set up iCloud which us already set up.

Had to go to my pc laptop to get iCloud.com to work and then was able to find my iCloud content.

I’m just thinking now despite the danger of the iPhone breaking that I don’t need to pay 99¢ a month to save photos.

Where is what? What do you mean, you can’t find iCloud on your iPhone?

There’s no reason to ever go to iCloud.com from your iPhone, I don’t think. You can do everything through apps that access iCloud data.

This is like a tech version of Who’s on First.

 

[TonyD]

Maybe I just don’t understand what using iCloud is or does.

According to my iPhone I have 40+ gb of photos in/on iCloud
But I don’t have that much currently in my iPhone.
Only about 21 gbs Of photos
So if I want to see those 40+ gbs of photos on my iPhone how do I do that?

 

[Thomas Newton]

Apple – Archive or make copies of the information you store in iCloud

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204055

 

[DaveF]

According to my iPhone I have 40+ gb of photos in/on iCloud
But I don’t have that much currently in my iPhone.
Only about 21 gbs Of photos
So if I want to see those 40+ gbs of photos on my iPhone how do I do that?

You just look at them in the Photos app. The iPhone has thumbnails of your entire library. And it will download full resolution photos from iCloud if it's not stored locally as needed.

With iCloud library turned on (and storage enough for your full library), the Apple devices will automatically add or remove photos to manage capacity for other apps and data, since it's all on iCloud. (Caveat, I see iOS purging Netflix downloads without first purging Photos. So it's still not perfect and app dependent.)

Maybe I just don’t understand what using iCloud is or does.

It's cloud storage.
It's unified storage seen and usable by all your Apple products (iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacBook Pro, etc.)
It's offloading storage if your devices have insufficient storage for everything.

 

[DaveF]

I'm not a power user of cloud storage. But it's handy to me, even so. As another example, I have a handful of Numbers spreadsheets that I want access to on the go, but I also want to edit on the desktop at times since it's easier there. I keep them in iCloud. They're not on my iMac local drive.

Heres the Numbers "open" UI on my iPhone and my iMac showing these files.

 

[DaveF]

Another example:
I play Star Wars Armada (a collectible miniatures table top game). I have a collection of official rules and FAQs along with community-created guides on my iMac. I've also got a copy of the most useful of these in iCloud for iBooks* use, for access on my iPad when I'm playing with a friend and I want to check a rules clarification. Because I find and download new versions when at my desktop, I then copy them to the iBooks cloud storage for access on my iPad.



* This example is a weaker case, for me. iBooks has been mediocre at best over the years. It has been bad at syncing to devices, at organizing. Just really ungood. I switched to DropBox last year for this purpose and DropBox worked really well, especially with iOS 11's (or was it 10) introduction of the Files app with integration with DropBox and OneDrive. But then I pulled my manuals from DropBox as well. I was having trouble keeping them manually synced and updated. And I wasn't using them during gaming sessions much anymore.

But discussing in this thread, I decided to give iBooks another try as it's updated for iOS 12 and Mojave.

This gets back to my tension of whether to have files on the iMac local storage or in iCloud or both. iCloud is very handy in the right uses, but it doesn't afford good organization to my taste. Whereas I'm still a child of the '80s and like to have nicely organized folder structure for my files.

 

[TonyD]

Oh boy well.

my 256g iPhone recently became completely full due to Amazon music now upgrading much of its content to what they call Ultra HD.
I found out when an iPhone is near full capacity it gets hot fast and slows down and sometimes doesn’t work properly.

So I started deleting songs and photos since the photos are all on Amazon.
I also have nearly 300 videos of various length on the phone and started added them to my YouTube account.
Super time consuming.

So with the belief that the photos and videos would be sent to the iCloud I once again upgraded my iCloud space, this time to the 200gb allotment, plenty.

Started to upload and backup my iPhone to iCloud.

Somewhere in that process my iPhone froze and it rebooted itself but
It got stuck on the Apple logo and I couldn’t get past that.

So I figured out how to get into the recovery mode screen.
Then after a dozen attempts to recover my iPhone it finally recovered and I was able to start it again.

I deleted the Amazon music app and it’s 99gbs of music.

All back to normal.

Was also able to do the backup into iCloud as that didn’t work before either.

So now that I did that I see that only a handful of the near.y 300 video clips are showing up on iCloud.com/photos.

So going by what was mentioned earlier in this thread should I expect the videos to get loaded into iCloud as needed and eventually I may see more then a handful showing up in iCloud?