iCloud

Charles is noticing several of his recent photo files aren't as large as they should be on his Mac Mini. Leo says that if Charles is using Apple Photos for an App to store his photos, to r/c on the photos library, and then select Show Package Contents, he'll see photo folders, including the "originals" photo folder. That'll verify his originals are there.

Al and his wife have decided to move everything up to the cloud and use a smaller Mac Air instead of his huge 27" iMac. He's uploaded everything up to Amazon. Will that be safe? Leo says it will, but it's a smart idea to have more than one backup option. Make a local backup copy and a second service in the cloud. Leo recommends Google Photos because it's free. If Al has iCloud, then he can turn on Cloud syncing and then sync them all. He can then optimize storage in Apple Photos and it'll eliminate the high res versions until he needs them, but he can still see them in Photos. 

Jim's wife has a 32GB iPhone and she keeps running out of space because iCloud keeps downloading the pictures back to her phone. Leo says to look in the Photo settings. Make sure that the "optimize phone storage" feature is enabled. It will keep the full rez photos in the cloud, and a lower rez version on your phone. The other option is to turn off automatic sync to iCloud. That will prevent iCloud from putting them back on the phone and once the user deletes them, they will stay deleted. Then use Google Photos to save photos to the cloud and delete them off the phone.

Sharon has an iPhone XR with a mess of reminders in it, along with notes. But when she updated the phone, her lists all disappeared. Leo says that there are a whole bunch of lists in reminders. So Sharon may have overlooked them. If they are missing, they might be on iCloud. How can she find them? She has no idea. Leo says to go to iCloud.com and log in with your Apple ID. You can find that info in your phone settings. Once you log in, you can snoop around until you find it. It may be in notes.

Tom wants to know what Apple has done with the iPhone 11 camera. He's having issues with editing the software. Leo says that's likely because Apple has adopted the HEIC image codec, which is a new standard that not every program supports. He can change the format in camera settings, but he can also export it as RAW or JPG when sharing.  Leo says that Apple saves full-res versions on iCloud, while caching lower-res versions on the iPhone. So when users open it in the photo editor, they have to wait for the phone to download the full-res version before the app can open it.

Terry edits 4K video with his iPhone 11 Pro Max. But when he makes changes, the upload to his iMac is very slow. Leo says that no online backup is going to use all the bandwidth you have to backup. And your upload speed is always drastically lower than your download speed. Leo says that Apple does offer iCloud backup on your mobile phone, but it's only 5GB for free, and the data isn't private.  You can buy extra bandwidth, however. Leo recommends also backing up directly to your Mac. 

George has a Seagate external hard drive for storing his photos. But when he opens it, he sees everything from photos to files. Leo says it's likely that his Mac is using Time Machine, and it's backing up everything. You have the option to disable the backing of system files and other data. So spend some time in the settings and decide what you want to backup. Once you tell Time Machine what drive you want for backup, then it'll backup regularly. Leo also recommends enabling iCloud.