Deleting Photos, what iCloud saves and how to access things from iCloud and device storage issues My understanding (erroneous as I may be told this is) is that iCloud is like a virtual external drive to some extent. Maybe that is my first mistake. But before everyone starts saying to look at other posts, please know I believe I have read all the posts about photo stream, camera roll, and the link that was posted (in one of these answers on this general topic) about iCloud backups, as well as those Q&amp;A's related to freeing up space. I am still confused. 

I am reaching storage capacity on my iPhone. I have a lot of photos on my phone because they've always migrated over from phone to phone every year or so. However, I need to free up some space and would like to delete photos from my iPhone (the device I took them on), but am still not sure if I do this, if it will remain on iCloud.

I have an iPad and a Macbook too, and they (the photos and docs) are on there, but with photos I just don't ever want to lose, I want to be sure that if I start deleting off my phone, and my computer gets stolen or dies and my iPad is broken or whatever, that I can still always access all of my photos by just logging in to iCloud from any device.

I (supposedly) have iCloud backing up all of these things. However, If I log into iCloud.com, I do  not see my documents and photos. Shouldn't I conceivably be able to log in to iCloud.com from any device (Apple or not - say my work computer) and access my saved documents and photos?

Because I cannot go to iCloud.com (not settings/iCloud - bit iCloud.com) and see these things, I am hesitant to delete photos from my phone, depending on the idea that they are stored in iCloud. The same is true, to a different extent with my documents.

I have purchased extra storage on iCloud w/the idea that these things will always be there. What am I missing.

Also, aside from apps, photos and documents - are there some less obvious things I can delete that will free up space that would not be evident to the less than professionally savvy user?
Your question is probably about 5 ones about how things work, so I'll address the elephant in the room.

You need to decide how you want your photos to be stored.


Where do you archive them for long term storage?
How many can you afford to lose?
When and how will you clean up all the photos that come from dozens of places so that your long term albums don't have hundreds of internet cat meme pictures and screen shots from iOS?


I would recommend sitting down with a nice cup of tea or coffee and a large piece of paper and just list out what devices you want to take pictures from, what the master collection looks like, and how you'll manage things coming in to and out of that master collection.

Once you've done that, you can look at iCloud through a web browser - https://www.icloud.com/#photos and get a good picture of how close that "master collection" is to your ideal collection. 

Then look at your Storage Settings - https://www.icloud.com/#settings



If you are running short, pay a little $$ for one month to buy yourself time and space to get everything safely into iCloud.

Then you can decide if you have a computer to hold things and want to make use of the free iCloud photo stream to get all your photos onto that computer or if you want another solution (google has one, dropbox has one, yahoo/flickr has one, many custom services exist for amateurs and pros to store photo libraries online).

Best of luck. The site will be here for you to ask more narrow questions once you have decided how to steer your ship. It's hard for us to advise you on broad plans - but once you make the broad plans - we can help you navigate certain bends in the river or certain customs officials that are prickly to get your on your way to happy photo management.