IPhone seems to have to “download” all the recent photos, but iCloud is turned off

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.

First question: yes, iCloud backs up your photo as it is. If you delete media from your photos library it will be deleted from iCloud. (I might add that videos are also stored in the cloud - and consequently take up the most room).

Second question: It is possible you can use the Scanner and Camera wizard to import photos from your iPhone. Here is are two articles that briefly describe the process.

• Tech Recipes
• OSX Daily

Before you delete all (or most of) your photos off your iPhone, I would recommend that you double check that everything has been transfered correctly so you don't lose any pictures.

You probably already know this but it's worth mentioning anyways. When you go to delete photos from your iPhone, open the Photos app, click the Camera Roll album, then select the box with the arrow icon at the top right of the screen. Select pictures to be deleted, then tap the Delete button in the bottom bar (this is also a way to email more then one picture).

Of course, the other option would be to turn off the iCloud backup of your photos. (You already know how to get there but go to iCloud > Storage & Backup > Manage Storage > [your name] iPhone > Turn Camera Off.)