There’s a part of the Apple ecosystem that I’ve not touched on here on iGeekCentral, but I get asked about a lot in the comments, and that’s iCloud. It’s something that I reckon we all use every day as Apple users, yet a huge number of people find it really confusing. And to be fair, that’s because Apple make it way more confusing than it needs to be.
So in this guide, I’m going to explain what iCloud is, and what it isn’t. I’ll debunk some myths, and try and answer some Frequently Asked Questions, so that hopefully by the end of this guide, iCloud will be a tool you can use with confidence, to get the most out of it, rather than be confused by.
What is iCloud?
Probably the most important thing to understand when it comes to iCloud, is that iCloud is NOT designed as a cloud storage solution. This might sound crazy to you, because ultimately it’s storage for data, and it’s in the cloud, so how can I possibly and tell you that iCloud is NOT a cloud storage solution?
The answer lies in the way in which you’re going to be using iCloud, and understanding how Apple intend for you to use iCloud, versus a service like Dropbox for example.
Dropbox explain their service in the first line on their website. It’s “the choice for storing and sharing your most important files”.
If you have electronic files, whether that’s Photos or Videos or Documents like PDFs, Word files or pretty much anything else, you can put them into Dropbox and know that they’re safe and secure there, and you can then use the tools built-in to Dropbox to share those files with other people to work collaboratively on documents or let other people view Photos, all that good stuff. You put something in Dropbox, and so long as you continue to pay your monthly fee, if you go back to it a couple of years later, the files would still be there, ready for you to download.
And Dropbox also employs a certain degree of device synchronisation. So if I install the Dropbox client on my MacBook Air, and I put a photo into my Dropbox folder there, it will then upload that file to the cloud, and if I were to then go to my MacBook Pro and check out the same Dropbox folder, I could view the file in there as well. But in general, Dropbox is more about manually putting files into a specific part of your computer or your phone, hence the name, in order for the software to be able to sync and backup that file.
iCloud on the other hand, is all about bringing the overall Apple experience together, seamlessly. In Apple’s mind, your iPhone, iPad and Mac, are just different tools used to access the same data, the same experience, depending on where you are and what you’re doing.
You can see this if you download an app like Pages on all your Apple devices, it’s essentially the same word processing app, regardless of whether you use it on your iPhone, or your iPad or your Mac.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with Photos and videos.
To illustrate this, here’s a photo that I took on my daily driver iPhone, this is an iPhone 15 Pro Max and I got this picture when I was out walking the dog. I’m quite fortunate, because of what I do for a living, I have a number of Apple devices, and the whole point of iCloud is that, seconds after this picture is taken, my iPhone is going to automatically upload it to the cloud, without me doing anything, it just happens in the background.
This does two things – it backs the photo up, but it also means that, long before I get home from my dog walk, the photo is available for me to view on the Photos app on my iPad, on my Mac Studio, on my MacBook Air, even on my Apple TV or my Watch.
But this is where the service differs from something like Dropbox. Not only is the photo visible in your Photos app, but the Photo library is identical on your different devices, again, without you doing anything. If you then take your iPad for example, and snap a photo on that, or import a photo from a camera, that image will then be visible on all your other devices, including your iPhone, all of your devices feed into, and pull data from iCloud. Even though you might own lots of different Apple devices, you’ve got one iCloud, which is recreating that same experience, no matter which device you pick up.
Here’s a really important thing you need to understand. Let’s say I’m now sitting with my Mac, working on that, and I open the Photos app and see the photo in there, and I think ‘well, I don’t want that photo here, taking up space on my Mac, I only want it on my iPhone’, so I right-click and I delete the photo. Keep in mind, you’re not looking at your Mac’s photo library, you’re looking at your iCloud Photo library, you just happen to be viewing it on your Mac. So if you delete it here, you delete it everywhere, including the cloud.
So the way in which you need to think about iCloud, certainly in terms of data, is that it’s like having a single, over-arching cloud, that’s accessible regardless of the device that you’re using. The way in which you access that cloud is going to vary depending on your device, and what you’re trying to access. So from iCloud, you’ve got loads of services, like Photos, and iCloud Drive, and iCloud KeyChain, and lots of others, that we’ll talk about in this guide.
What does iCloud store?
In short, iCloud stores a lot. If I open my iPhone, I can tap into Settings, then tap on Apple Account, then tap on iCloud, and then under Apps using iCloud, I can tap on Show All, and i can see everything that’s included in iCloud.
As we’ve already mentioned, and as I think most people will make use of, iCloud will store the photos and videos that you capture on your connected Apple devices, and they’re stored in your Photos app.
iCloud Drive stores all of your documents, either documents that you’ve created using the iWork suite like Pages, Numbers and Keynote, or documents that you’ve imported into Files, things like PDFs, Zip files, Word or Excel files, or really any type of digital file. There is a 50GB limit per file, and you can’t use it to store things like Library files.
Mail, Messages, Contacts and Calendar syncs across all your devices, as do first party productivity apps like Reminders, Notes and Freeform. So when you put a Reminder on your iPhone, and then you notice it on your iPad for example, that’s iCloud working in the background.
Any Health data that you input on your phone will sync to the cloud, and since the introduction of iPadOS 17, you can view and edit that data in the dedicated Health app for iPad, and changes will be reflected across all devices.
Passwords and login information are secured in iCloud Keychain, as well as browser information in Safari, things like your bookmarks, favourites, and even profiles.
Many of Apple’s first party apps like Stocks, News, Books, Game Center, TV and more use iCloud to keep everything in sync for you, and if a third party app offers iCloud sync, that data will also be stored securely in your iCloud account.
And of course, backups of your devices are stored in the cloud.
Isn’t iCloud Drive basically iCloud?
One of the most common misconceptions I see when it comes to iCloud, is people getting iCloud, and iCloud Drive confused. Think of it hierarchically – iCloud is the cloud service that sits up top, and then has all of these services branching off from it, of which Photos is one, iCloud Keychain is one, iCloud Drive is one, and they all exist because they leverage iCloud.
iCloud Drive is like the Photos app on your iPhone but for files. It’s a place where you store digital content, that’s immediately accessible on all your different Apple devices. The difference is that rather than storing specifically Photos and Videos (which you can store here by the way, just to confuse things even further), iCloud Drive is designed for files like word processing documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, PDFs and most other similar files. You CAN store photos and videos here if you wish, you’re just better off storing them in the dedicated Photos app instead.
To explain further how it works, i have a PDF that I’ve got stored locally on my Mac. If i open Finder, and then drop the PDF into iCloud Drive, then check my iPhone, which is logged into the same iCloud account, I can then open the Files app, and i can see the PDF, right there and ready for me.
If I right-click on that file on my Mac, I’ll be presented with two options for removing this file.
I can move it to the bin, or i can remove the download. If i move it to the bin, the file will be removed from my Mac, but also iCloud, so this will no longer be visible here on my Mac, or anywhere, the file is deleted. Alternatively, if i choose Remove Download, i’m going to remove the physical file from here on my Mac, which will free up space here on my Mac, but it will stay in the cloud, accessible on all my devices.
You’ll know this has happened if you see a cloud icon with a little arrow pointing down. Tapping on that icon will download the file to your computer, but so would double clicking to open it up. Like I mentioned earlier, this is one of those annoying things where the feature to remove downloads exists in iCloud Drive, but not in Photos.
Your computer is generally pretty good at managing all of this by itself. It learns that, if you’ve got files that you’re opening and editing on a regular basis, it will generally keep those on your machine, whilst also syncing it in the cloud, but files that you rarely ever use or haven’t touched in a long time will be offloaded.
In general, because of the way iCloud Drive is designed, you’ll probably manage most of your iCloud Drive data from within other apps. So for example, when I create the PDFs for iGeekCentral, I open up Pages, I create a new document, and I choose the Pages folder in my iCloud Drive, as the place to store the document.
Because I create them in iCloud Drive, rather than say in my downloads folder or a folder that’s local to my computer only, it means that I can start the project on my Mac Studio, but then I could grab my MacBook Air, or my iPad or even my iPhone, and pick up right where I left off, plus any changes that I make would be immediately synced to the cloud, and therefore all my devices.
What about Shared Photo Albums?
A question I get asked all the time is, “why, if I create a new album in Photos, and move photos there, do the photos still show in my All Photos tab?” And the reason for this is that All Photos is exactly what it sounds like, it’s your messy, unorganised, shoebox under the bed storage for all your images. Yes, you can then go and create albums, but those albums are basically collections of content taken from your All Photos box, which is why they still exist in that. If you put a photo in an album, then go and delete the photo from your All Photos, it’s deleted, including from the album you put it in.
There’s one exception to this rule, and that’s Shared Photo Albums. So if you open the Photos app, let’s say that you tap the Plus button in the upper left of the screen, and choose New Shared Album. You would give the album a name, then choose Next, and then you would add anyone that you’d like to invite to that album, although you can skip that if you wish and just tap Create, even though it’s called a Shared Album, you don’t actually have to share it with anyone.
The album is now created, and if you tap into it, then tap the Plus button, you can begin selecting Photos and videos from your own photo library, to add to this shared album.
You could then, quite safely, delete the images from your All Photos collection, because the images are still in the cloud, but in the Shared Albums instead.
The entire point of a shared album is that you’re probably going to share it with other people, and ideally, they’re going to add content to it also. My wife and I create one each time we go on holiday, and every day we just add all the pictures we’ve taken to create one giant album that we can both look at whenever we like. I could, therefore, go through my photo library, and delete the images in my All Photos, and they’ll remain in the shared album. I don’t bother with this personally, because I trust my phone to do a good enough job at optimising the storage, but this could be a method you could use for having a bit more control over how you manage and organise your photos. But as ever, remember that if you delete the photos from the shared album, or if you delete the shared album entirely, those photos are gone. And also, remember that if you create a Shared Album, it’s still using up some of your iCloud storage space, even if you remove the photos from your phone, so this isn’t a hack for getting free iCloud storage or anything like that.
What about Backups?
Another function of iCloud is to store backups of your various different devices. So let’s say for example, that I’m out with my iPhone, and I lose it, and can’t get it back. I buy a new phone, I can use iCloud to download the latest backup of that phone to my new handset.
Now, keep in mind that iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive are both separate from device backups, and keep in mind that all of the apps, things like Notes, Reminders, Freeform, News, Messages, although they do store data in the cloud, that’s also separate, you might be forgiven for wondering A) what does a backup of a phone or iPad actually contain, and
B) is there any point in having one?
The answer, to B at least, is ‘yes’, because a backup is going to save you a lot of time and effort. If we head to Apple’s support page, they tell you exactly what is kept in a device backup.
It’s data about your device’s Settings, Home Screen layout and App organisation. It’s things like your Apple Watch backups, because your Watch gets paired with your iPhone, so the backup for that is kept within your iPhone backup. It’s app data for various different apps, but it’s also Photo and video backups, if you’re not using iCloud Photos, although honestly, I’d recommend that you enable iCloud Photos for simplicity. It’s Messages, if you’re not using Messages in iCloud.
So you can see that, if you’re someone who generally makes use of iCloud, device backups are a convenience more than anything else, saving you from having to mess around in Settings.
To enable iCloud backups, go into Settings, tap on Apple Account at the top of the screen, and then find your device in the list down at the bottom of this page. Tap on your device, and ensure that iCloud Backup is enabled. You may wish to disable Back Up Over Mobile Data, I’ve got an unlimited data plan so I’m not worried about this, in general my iPhone is going to backup at night, over WiFi.
Another common misconception here is that backups are created new, and add to old backups, clogging up your iCloud storage, this isn’t the case at all, any new backups overwrite the old ones, so you should only ever have one backup per device in your iCloud storage.
Managing iCloud Storage
So, every Apple ID comes with 5GB of free storage from Apple. That’s every Apple ID, not every Apple device. So one of the tools that I use for my videos is a burner account, I created a separate Apple ID with fake information, and it’s full of photos that I don’t care if people see in my videos, and Notes that don’t contain any personal information, and fake contacts and all that kind of stuff, because it makes my life easier when I’m creating social media videos. I created this burner account for free with Apple, and it came with 5GB of iCloud space, that I can use to upload photos and videos, documents in iCloud Drive, backups, everything we’ve already talked about.
5GB is not a lot of data these days. On my real account, my iPhone backups are about 5GB by themselves, so you can understand how this data gets eaten up pretty quickly, and honestly, this is deliberate by Apple. They want to give you just enough data so that you can experience the benefits of it, but not enough that you can stay a free member for too long.
The good news is that iCloud space is cheap. Now you could head into Settings, then Apple Account, then iCloud, then Manage Account Storage, and you can see your storage usage. On my real account, 262GB of space is dedicated to my photo library. So if this bothered me, I could go into Photos and I could be ruthless, and delete some content from in there to free up some space.
Or I could access Photos on my Mac, and grab a load of pictures and videos, and pull them across to an external drive or upload them to a different storage provider, this by itself isn’t a bad idea by the way, just to ensure that your precious photos and videos are being stored in more than one place.
But honestly, what I would recommend most people do is pay for some more storage. On my burner account, if I tap into Change Storage Plan, I can get 50GB for
£1 a month, 200GB for £3 a month, and 2TB for £9 per month.
If you’d prefer to go down the manual route of deleting iCloud storage, it’s all here in Manage Account Storage, but do of course be aware that if you delete anything, it’s gone for good.
What is iCloud.com?
iCloud.com is basically the web interface that you use to access much of what we’ve discussed in this guide, via the web. You would navigate to iCloud.com and login with your Apple ID and password. Once logged in, you can do a surprising amount. You can access your iCloud Mail, as well as view your Contacts, Calendar, Notes and Reminders. You can view and work in the iSuite of apps, that’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote. You can use FindMy to find your devices. You can view your photos and videos in the Photos app, and your files in the Drive app. You can also view your storage usage, and make changes to your plan there if you wish. You can access Data Recovery, where you’ve got 30 days to restore any files that you might have deleted from iCloud.
iCloud.com is really useful, but it’s one of those ‘there if you need it’ types of services. I tend not to use it, because I’m really embedded into the Apple ecosystem, and all the work I do is on an Apple device. But if I was having to jump between an Apple device and an Android phone, or a Windows PC for example, it would be really useful to me. Keep in mind, everything you do on iCloud.com is going to be in your browser, so totally online in other words. If you download and change anything, you’d then have to upload it again to ensure iCloud is up to date.
What about iCloud+ ?
If you sign up for a paid version of iCloud, you also get access to iCloud+ features.
iCloud Private Relay is designed to make it more difficult for companies to build a profile about you, based on things like your IP address, location and browsing history. It’s different to a VPN, but it offers some degree of the protection that a VPN would offer you.
Hide My Email allows you to create unique, random email addresses that automatically forward to your inbox. This is actually really useful, I’ve used this a bunch of times where I maybe want to signup for something, but I’d prefer to not use my actual email address.
HomeKit Secure Video allows compatible cameras to be viewed within the Home app on all your devices, and for the footage to be analysed by your HomeHub, to allow for human detection, all that kind of stuff. It would be a great feature, had Apple not totally neglected it these past few years.