IPhone – How to sync only those photos that were taken this year

Before a sync or restore, I believe that iTunes will create a backup of your phone's contents (unless you manually cancel this backup). The backup will contain the photos and videos that were on the phone.

You can check if a backup was created by doing the following:

1. Launch iTunes
2. iTunes > Preferences > Devices
3. See if there is an entry with the date of the restore.

If a backup exists, you can recover your data with one of two methods:

• Restore your phone using that backup; or
• Use an application such as iPhone Backup Extractor to extract the images out of the backup file.

You can export original photos out of Photos on the Mac and then delete them.

At that point, they go into the Recently Deleted album. You can then manage things so you don't exceed your 5 GB allowance.

Both iOS and Mac preferences allow you to measure and see the storage allocation.

Then you can have a second Photos database on the Mac to store all the "offline" photos. It won't be the "system library" and it won't receive photos automatically from the cloud. You'll have to import photos manually to that second (and all other) libraries.