iPhone and internal picture storage

[Adam B]

hopefully a quick question (actually 3)

I want to understand how pictures are stored in the icloud vs my iphone. I try to minimise what I actually store on my phone, so anything admin related I want to keep I move photos off the phone and store on my NAS. Also I often hit my icloud capacity so tend to use that for storing contacts/calendar/email/docs and not photos.

So when I plug the phone into my Windows laptop in order to do a photo clearout, I see iPhone/internal storage/DCIM followed by a bunch of directories

100 APPLE
101 APPLE
100 CLOUD
101 CLOUD

What makes me nervous is I often see my missus' photos in the CLOUD directories, I have not taken them or asked to store them but some are important to her, hence nervousness about deleting off phone.

Can you confirm?
1. I asume I am seeing her phtoos because we are connected by Apple and can share icloud photos, when at home on same wifi?
2. Despite the convenience of 1, why does Apple copy down my missus' cloud photos on to my internal phone storage?
3. Am i right in thining I can delete anything I want from the CLOUD directories (using windows explorer and looking at iphone's "internal storage") and it will be retained in the cloud?
4. the only photos physically stored on my phone are in the APPLE directories?

thanks

[Jakg]

Adam B said:

1. I asume I am seeing her phtoos because we are connected by Apple and can share icloud photos, when at home on same wifi?
2. Despite the convenience of 1, why does Apple copy down my missus' cloud photos on to my internal phone storage?

Nothing to do with "same wifi". It's likely you are in an Apple "Family" and you have setup shared albums.

Adam B said:

3. Am i right in thining I can delete anything I want from the CLOUD directories (using windows explorer and looking at iphone's "internal storage") and it will be retained in the cloud?

I think the iPhone is read-only from Windows. You can only delete photos from the iPhone itself.

Adam B said:

4. the only photos physically stored on my phone are in the APPLE directories?

No. The photos your seeing are on the phone.

Photos in iCloud may or not be on the device, also.

[Adam B]

thanks Jakg

Jakg said:

Nothing to do with "same wifi". It's likely you are in an Apple "Family" and you have setup shared albums.

ah yes agreed, but still why does Apple copy down my missus' cloud photos on to my internal phone storage? Does this maybe happen if I view an icloud picture of my OH on my phone, and it copies the image to my phone?

Jakg said:

I think the iPhone is read-only from Windows. You can only delete photos from the iPhone itself.

No you can, I do it regularly.

Jakg said:

Photos in iCloud may or not be on the device, also.

thanks but that doesn't get to the crux of my question, if a picture has somehow gone from cloud to phone am I OK deleting it from phone and its safe in the cloud? Logic says yes but want to 100% sure.

Also interested if my interpretation of APPLE and CLOUD iphone storage directories is correct