Having painstakingly deleted hundreds of unwanted photos, dare I re-sync another Mac to iCloud that still has many of the deleted ones?

I have already deleted hundreds of photos in iCloud, and this works fine on my iPhone and Macbook.

However, I also have an IMac which WAS synced to the other machines up till 2017. This means in Photo it has all the photos I ever took up to 2017 including the hundreds that I have carefully deleted from iCloud.

I want to set it so it syncs to iCloud again. But if I do, will the deleted photos get added back into my Photos from this IMac? So wasting the many hours of filleting.

Is there any risk of this? Is there anything I can do? Should I actually delete all the photos from the IMac before syncing? Would this run the risk of deleting them all from iCloud once I sync (I would not want to risk that!).

I have checked other questions but this seems to be new. My question is the opposite of many others I see, when people cannot get deleted photos to sync to another device.

Its an old iMac using OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 Thanks for advice.

Solution 1:

There’s no risk if you have a backup. Cloud syncs, just like RAID are not backups.

I’ve had very good experience with Apple tracking when I delete files from a fully health sync setup. Adding a new device to sync generally wants to combine all.

Also - look at a tool that can easily clean duplicates if you run into this situation often.

• https://fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

If you want to be safe, set up a new photo library or export all the photos before you start. Designate the empty library as the system one and then go slowly once you’re sure the sync is solid.

• https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204414