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Moving videos to the Cloud and keeping them there

Posted by (Seattle, WA) on

I have been using my iPad to store photos and videos, both of our grandchildren and of our travels. I did not realize how much space the videos in particular take up, and now I need to move them to free up 5-6 gigabytes. I have been doing that, by emailing them to myself ( where they take up no space in gmail) and by moving them to iCloud ( where I have pretty much unlimited space). After moving them I delete them from my photo stream.

Each day I move about 10-15 videos to the cloud, check my storage usage and it is down. Then the videos somehow reappear in my photo stream ( and still exist in the Cloud) and my used space goes back up. Yesterday I deleted the same videos twice more after the first time deleting them. I thought that would do it, but this morning they are baaaaack!

What do I need to do differently? I tried tried turning the iPad totally off after the deletions, but the videos still reappeared, so that didn't work.

Thanks for your help. In could go visit the Apple Genius Bar but thought I would first try asking here.

Posted by
28069 posts

I'm neither a geek nor an Apple user, so my advice is worth little, but I suspect you are set up to automatically sync what's on your iPad with what's in the cloud. I'm sure the Genius Bar folks will be able to straighten it out easily if no one here can help.

I do suggest, though, that you find a friend who is willing to burn your most precious videos and photos to DVDs so you have a physical back-up. If you have a desktop computer with a DVD burner, you can make the DVDs yourself once you figure out how to move them over from the iPad.

Posted by
178 posts

Go to Settings. Then go to Photos and Cameras. If iCloud Photo Library is set to "ON," it will automatically upload and store your entire library in iCloud to photos and videos on your iPad. Turn that off.

Posted by
17425 posts

Dean--that sounds like the answer. You are referring to the "photo stream" button, right? It says it "automatically uploads new photos and sends them to all your iCloud devices."

Will this affect Photo Sharing? My kids have created several different photo streams where they post photos and videos of the grandchildren. These show up in the Cloud, so they don't take up storage space. I don't want to turn the sharing off!

acraven---that is a good idea---lots of redundancy which is good with precious videos. I will see if I can find a way to put the videos on a CDs as well---I think my husband can do that with a thing that attaches to his Mac laptop.

Posted by
28069 posts

CDs don't hold a lot, so I don't know how much video you'll be able to fit on one. It depends, of course, on what level of detail you recorded in the first place. I record TV shows at a fairly standard level for play-back and can fit about 2 hours of video on a DVD. If I wanted to store that video on a CD, only about 20 minutes would fit. However, I think iPads and smartphones make smaller video files, so using CDs for back-up storage might be fine.

Posted by
17425 posts

Ok, I actually do not know the difference between a CD and a DVD. Totally tech-ignorant. But I know my husband put videos on a disc for a recent reunion and made copies for everyone, so he should know what to do. But he does not have an iPad so that part is for me to figure out.

These videos are mostly 20-50 seconds---first steps and first bike ride and things like that. So not long but they sure take up space on my iPad! So far I have freed up 5 gigabytes of storage space---and those videos are still completely accessible from the Cloud.

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