Bizarre iCloud situation I don't understand. Help me Obi Wan Kenobi you're my only hope!

[jpinard]

Here’s the setup:

We spent half the week with my parents at their little cottage. They don’t have wifi or Internet so I was dependent on the family data plan via Verizon. We took lots of pictures and video with my phone and we suddenly ran out of cellular data - first time ever. I discovered my phone was uploading all my new pictures and video to iCloud. OK, so I guess I’ll turn it off. So here’s what I try to do:

My ID >> iCloud >> Photos >> then I switch the “iCloud Photo Library” to off. However here’s the brain-bending twist. When I switch it to off I get the following message:

“Do you want to download a copy of your iCloud Photo Library to this iPhone?”

I have two options to choose between: “Remove from iPhone” or “Download Photos & Videos”. The only one that makes sense is Remove from iPhone? So I select that and I get the following message:

“2,596 photos and videos will be removed from this iPhone. These photos and videos will remain in the iCloud Photo Library”

But I don’t want to remove any photos or videos from my phone, I just don’t want to upload any to the cloud when I’m not at my house connected to my wifi.

Can anyone help me figure this out? I don’t mind iCloud sync when I’m home and my phone uses my Internet as there’s no charge against cell data. But how do I manually tell it to not sync sometimes and sync other times?

[LeeAbe]

What I believe it is saying is that not all of your photos are on your phone. If you turn it off, do you want to download them? Is optimize storage set to on? If so it’s been uploading everything to save space on your phone.

I can’t find a support article that really explains it though, and that’s a pretty bad set of options. I wouldn’t be comfortable with either option. Can you go to a coffee shop and take advantage of WiFi to download it?

[jpinard]

I’m home now which is why I’m posting :)

I would like to know this for future reference. As you noticed, neither option is appropriate and it is such a simple, basic task.

[LeeAbe]

Apple has a really bad habit of assuming we all have unlimited data, drives me nuts.

I wouldn’t use it. You can’t just turn it half way through because half your pictures are in a different spots. Not a great answer I know, but if there is a way, my google skills are failing me.

[cicobuff]

Can you set it to deny Celluar Data access?

Like this? The Photos app is turned off for Celullar but it can still sync via Wifi.

[Thierry_Nguyen]

What phone and iOS are you on? My iPhone 8 on iOS 11.4 has a setting to not use cellular data when uploading photos.

[jpinard]

Yes - that is the exact setting i needed. Thanks!