by brendoelfrendo 12 hours ago
Cloud backups are great for keeping your photos long-term, but if you want those photos on your phone so you can show them to people or share them, you need to download them anyway.
I need storage because Honkai: Star Rail is 32gb and I like being able to have more than one game on my phone.
iCloud seems to work differently. Nearly all of the photos and videos I have are stored in iCloud because my phone is only a 64 GB device. But I can scroll back many years and pull up any photo video and play or view just fine right away. I can swipe right through long sequences of photos from five years ago on a device that doesn’t have them downloaded. I’m not sure exactly how that works.
I know good network connectivity is not a privilege that everyone has, but on google photos I can scroll back all the way to 2007 when my digital photo collection started (I uploaded everything I had manually), and it's as if all those photos are local on my device.