IPhone – clear the iPhone camera roll without losing any photo

apertureicloudiphoneiphotophoto-stream

It seems to me that all photos taken with the iPhone go into:

  • the iPhone Camera Roll
  • the iCloud photo stream
  • iPhoto/Aperture projects (e.g. "Photo stream for Decembre 2014")

Can I clear completely my iPhone's camera roll without losing any photo?

I.e. will the duplicates in the iCloud stream and in iPhoto/Aperture projects will be deleted or not?

My goal is to free some space on the iPhone while, of course, not losing anything.

Edit: when I say iPhoto/Aperture projects I mean that there are projects automatically created in Aperture for every month and my iPhone's photo are automatically added to it. I don't know how/why it works…

I haven't imported my phone's photos manually.

Screenshot:

screenshot

("flux de photos" means photo stream, "févr" means february, "janv" means january)

Best Answer

Some explanations about where your iPhone photos are stored:

  1. the iPhone Camera Roll Sure. This is the only standard thing that happens.

  2. the iCloud photo stream Happens only when you have enabled the My Photo Stream option in Settings->iCloud->Photos

  3. iPhoto/Aperture projects Will be the case if you connect your iPhone to you Mac and sync/export your photos.

Now based on the above, deleting photos from you Camera Roll do the follow in each case:

  1. will simply... delete them from your Camera Roll. They may still be in the Recently Deleted Album of your phone for some days.
  2. will also delete them from your Photo Steam since this is something for sharing, not storing/backing-up. Do not confuse this with the iCloud Photo Library (Beta)
  3. will not affect your photos in the iPhoto projects, since these are not synced automatically or something.

Edit after your explanations:

Deleting a photo from your Camera Roll will also delete it from the Photo Stream. And this applies to all your linked devices.

One should think the Photo Stream as a single common Album that all the devices have access to. Hence, any change to it, is reflected to all devices.

Long story short, if you have your photos saved in your mac you can safely delete them from your iPhone. If you feel uneasy with that, you can simply try it with a couple of photos and make sure that everything worked as you expected

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