iCloud Photo help

I am the go to person at work and with my husband when it comes to computer problems, but I am going blank on this one! My home computer is a MacBook and I have an iPhone with 64GB. When Apple switched their Photos from iPhoto years ago, all photos on my computer went to my iPhone and my iPad. This wasn’t really a problem until both my kids had babies; now the baby pictures out number everything else! I am low on phone memory, trying to figure out how to best gain some back.

There are pictures on my computer and iCloud that were saved from when my kids were teenagers; I have sports/dance/prom pictures from their cameras as well as mine. I also have all my dad’s camera photos as I downloaded from his memory card and made CDs for him so he could load them on his computer. I want to save these photos, but I don’t need them on my phone also. For some reason, many of these duplicated; I am trying to delete these manually, but it is a chore. It seems I delete and they seem to reappear, possibly when my phone and computer backup; I am working on this also.

Seems like if a photo is in iCloud, it will be on every device with the same Apple ID. I know I could move these photos to another cloud service and delete from iCloud, but I would like to keep them where they are. When it is time for a new computer, with Apple everything shows up just like it was on the old computer making my life easier.

What am I missing here? I can not imagine this can’t be done.

I keep iCloud Photos off but leave on My Photo Stream. You can decide which photos to save to your Mac as well as which pics from Mac you want to see on your phone with Shared Albums. If you are having a space issue on computer you can always see you photos Library on an external and can actually have more than one library. Just hold down the Option or Control keep when you start photos to select the library. There are also programs for removing duplicates.

Back when I had less storage on my iphone I flipped some setting that said not to store copies locally. You should be able to find it with a google search.

iCloud albums can help too, I’ll frequently share to an album then immediately delete my local copy.