All advice / instructions I can find assumes I want more space on my phone by offloading on to Mac – for me it’s the other way around. I want all the photos currently in iCloud (in full resolution) to be on my phone, so that they are no longer on my Mac or in iCloud.
How can I achieve this?
Macbook Air 2013
Mohave, iOS 12.1.4
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Colin McKinney
You have the same "optimize" options on both iOS and macOS. You are right in that usually people want to have all of their photos on their Macs and save space on their iOS devices. But you can do it the opposite way too.
All you need to do is to turn on the optimize feature on your Mac, and have it turned off on your iPhone. On the Mac, the setting is located in Photos, Preferences, iCloud, Optimize Mac Storage.
Once you switch that on, your Mac can offload some of the photos and save some space. You'll still see all of your photos available in your library, of course, but eventually some of them will be offloaded to make space on your drive. Then when you go to view them the higher resolution versions of those photos will be loaded from iCloud. If you have a fast connection at home, you may not even notice the difference.