Turning Off iCloud Photo Library
I had thought I would leave iCloud Photo Library on, even though I use Lightroom rather than Photos. But there were several problems with that approach. Importing photos becomes confusing because Image Capture loses the ability to delete photos. There is a way to delete them from the phone, but freeing up space is a multi-step process. You can’t Select All and Delete in the Camera Roll, and even then the photos first move into Recently Deleted.
Another issue is that, although I like having recent photos in the cloud, there’s no way to prevent uploading them when I don’t have a good Internet connection. So it’s much simpler to just turn off iCloud Photo Library, foregoing the automatic cloud backup.
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I have the same workflow and constraints. My solution to getting recent photos in the cloud is the Dropbox iOS app's Camera Upload feature (https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/289). It will upload all new photos in the Camera Roll to Dropbox, and can be figured to do this if and only if the device has a wifi connection.
@Mike I think iCloud Photo Library can restrict itself to Wi-Fi. My issue is with slow Wi-Fi connections where I want the Mac to be able to use the bandwidth. So I don’t think Dropbox directly handles that, although you could toggle the feature on and off.
Note that you can kind of do select all in the camera roll now
If you tap select and then just tap-and-swipe-in-one-motion on a photo you can then swipe over a number of photos to select them all
It's not exactly select all, but it works pretty good in practice
@Bryan Kind of. It took me several tries to get that to work and auto-scroll through only 200 photos. There is a Delete All button in Recently Deleted, though.
You always can delete all photos in Image Capture even if you don't want to import them. And you don't need to use Photos to import...
@Reinard Image Capture doesn’t let you delete them if iCloud Photo Library is enabled. And Lightroom can’t delete after importing.
