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jonhohle11/04/20251 replyview on HN

Apple was killing it with iPhoto/Photos for this use case until a few years ago. Put in a memory card and Photos would import new photos, offer to delete after import, and ignore photos still on the card. Photo Stream made it possible to have a minimal set of photos in the cloud to have on other devices, which could be configured to sync various albums.

Then they moved to iCloud or manual sync and your forced to manage individual files again. Delete in iCloud, it’s gone everywhere. Want to keep your bad shots, but not have them on every device? Figure out how to move photos between multiple libraries while only being allowed to have one open at a time.


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Someone11/04/2025

> Then they moved to iCloud or manual sync and your forced to manage individual files again. Delete in iCloud, it’s gone everywhere. Want to keep your bad shots, but not have them on every device? Figure out how to move photos between multiple libraries while only being allowed to have one open at a time.

I don’t understand that. If you use iCloud, the cloud is primary storage, and your disk caches recently accessed cloud data.

So, just keep everything in a single library, and if your disk fills up iCloud will remove pictures you haven’t accessed recently from your disk.

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