3 Ways To Keep iCloud Files and Photos Local

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can keep some or all of your files and photos local when using iCloud. 

I'm often asked, how do you keep files local when using iCloud?  I address this in many videos but I thought I would make a video specifically about this question. So the idea is you're using iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos. This often means that while they appear here in the Finder locally, that you actually need to download them to open them. You don't have to do anything for this. Just double clicking the file to Open it will download the file automatically. 

For instance, look at these folders here. You can see this symbol here to the right indicating that some or all of the content in the folders isn't available locally. It's on Apple's servers in iCloud Drive and you can access it as long as you have an internet connection. For instance I look in this folder here and decide I want to access this file. Notice it has that symbol there. So, even though the file appears here in my file list, it will need to be downloaded when I open the file. Now if you have a moderately good internet connection just double clicking on this will download the file. You could see it doing it there, really briefly, and then it opens up. So it acts just like it is local. But what happens if you're not online and you want to open one of these files here. Well, it can't open the file because the data isn't there. It's online and you need an internet connection when you open that file. So the question is how can you make sure you have access to that file and other files when working on your Mac and you don't have an internet connection. 

Well, there are three primary ways to do this. The first is a simple setting. You go into System Settings and then you go to your Account here, and then to iCloud. Or you could have just looked for iCloud here in the left and selected it there. Then you'll see Drive, right here. Go into that and you have the setting Optimize Mac Storage. With this turned On it behaves exactly this way. It's saving space on your local drive by only having the most recently accessed iCloud files available to you at any moment. Anything else needs to be downloaded when you open the file. But if you simply turn this Off then all of your files will become available locally. In other words iCloud Drive still works the same but all the files are cached locally so you have access to them when you're offline. 

So say you're completely offline and you want to access one of your files. They would all be there. You can open them up and work with them. When you make changes those changes will be saved locally and then the next time you connect to the internet they would be synced to iCloud and then the updated versions would be available on your other devices, like your iPhone, your iPad, or perhaps a second Mac. 

Now there's a catch. You have to have enough space on your local drive, the drive on your Mac, in order for this to work. If you have, say, 700 GB of files in iCloud Drive and you only have a 500GB local drive on your Mac there's no way to fit 700 GB on a 500 GB drive. So in that case you have to have Optimize Mac Storage turned on. But I think a lot of people are in the situation where they have plenty of space locally. If you're not a content creator, if you're not creating videos or music or doing graphics work or development work then you may not have that many files. A lot of people are in that situation and having Optimize Mac Storage turned On really doesn't do anything for you because you have plenty of room locally. 

Now in addition to files, photos is another place which has this Optimize Setting. So you go into the Photos App and if you're using iCloud Photos and you go to Photos Settings, under iCloud here you've got the choice as to whether to Optimize Mac Storage or download originals to this Mac. It works exactly the same way as the iCloud Drive settings. So with Download Originals you have all of your photos always local all the time as well as on the iCloud Servers. If you turn on Optimize Mac Storage only your most recently accessed photos will be fully available locally, although you'll see thumbnails of all of your photos, just like you see file names and icons of the files in iCloud Drive. With Optimize Mac Storage turned On you can view any photo as long as you have an internet connection. It will just quickly and in the background download the full photo when you go to view it. But if you've got enough space on your local drive you can have Download Originals to this Mac turned On and then all of your photos will always be cached locally and available to view the full versions while offline as well as online. 

Okay, so that options will work for a lot of people. But if you do have more files and photos in iCloud than you have the space for on your Mac then there is another option that involves selecting the exact files and folders that you want always to be available locally. This only works for files, not photos. But you can go in the Finder here and decide that you want to have a specific file always available locally. Like maybe this file here. You're working on it all the time but sometimes you take breaks and you just want to make sure that you always have this file available. If you Control Click it, right click, or two-finger click on this file to bring up the Context Menu you'll notice that one of the options here is Keep Downloaded. If you select this now this file gets marked as a file that will always be local. It's like turning off Optimize Mac Storage for just this file. You can bring up the Context Menu again and Uncheck this option if you're done working with the file, for instance. You can also do it for an entire Folder. So you can bring up the Context Menu for the folder and select the entire folder as Keep Downloaded. 

Now obviously if we do this for a lot of folders and you just don't have enough space to store them all you're going to run into problems and get warning messages. But if you just do it for select folders that you know are important or projects that you are currently working on, or maybe projects you haven't worked on in a while but think you may need to work on soon, when you're offline, then it guarantees that those files will be available locally. 

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Note, that you'll only see Keep Downloaded if the file or folder is in iCloud Drive. It obviously won't appear for files that are in your Home Folder, say, and not stored in iCloud Drive. 

Now there's a third option for specific situations. This is when you want to take a file out of iCloud Drive, not have it stored on the iCloud Drive servers at all, but instead have it stored locally. So in other words just like it would have been if you weren't using iCloud Drive. You can easily do that but a lot of people don't realize it. So here I've got my Documents Folder. That's in iCloud Drive. If I Command Click here you can see that its root is iCloud Drive. If I go to iCloud Drive I can see all of the folders that are in iCloud Drive. But that's not all of  my folders. If I go to my Home Folder, here, I can see I've got folders like Movies, Music, Pictures, and other things. These folders, they're not iCloud Drive. They're just local folders. You can store things in here and create your own. So, for instance, I've created a folder here called Local Stuff. You may want to create one called, say, Local Documents. Then you could store whatever you want in here. These will be completely outside of iCloud Drive. So they wouldn't be available on say your iPhone or your iPad or a second Mac. They would only be local to this Mac. 

This is useful if you have a lot of large files that you're working on, on just that Mac. Like for instance for a content creator like me working with huge video files but just on my Desktop Mac I can store them in my Home Folder instead of iCloud Drive. I save the space on my iCloud Drive account and I don't mind because I only need those files on that one Mac. This is useful when you have the opposite problem to what I described earlier when you have a lot of storage on your Mac and less storage in iCloud Drive. So you want to store some of your files Local Only and only have certain files in iCloud Drive. Just create a local documents folder or something like that in your Home Folder and use that to store your Local Only file and then you use iCloud Drive to store everything else. 

There's a similar option to that for photos. In Photos under Settings you can go to General here and you can turn off Copy Items to the Photos Library. Then you can store photos, say, in your Home Folder maybe in the Pictures Folder or another folder you create there. Then when you import files while this checkbox is Off those files will be linked. They won't be imported into your Library and won't be part of iCloud Photos. Just remember to turn the checkbox back on for normal use for photos that should go into iCloud Photos. Also, keep in mind for photos not imported into the Photos Library you need to keep those photos around. You can't delete those files once you've imported them because you really haven't imported them. You're just linking to them inside of the Photos Library. 

Another technique is if you have multiple photos' libraries. One that is for iCloud, that is your main one. Then you can have other libraries that are for Local Only storage. But I don't recommend that because that means that searching for photos and compiling things like albums becomes pretty much impossible once you start dividing up your photo collection between multiple libraries. 

That's how you can make sure your data is local when using iCloud. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.