[iMore Question]

It’s taking up too much storage on my iPhone, I don’t use my iPad anymore so I don’t see the need in having iCloud Drive on. However I’m not sure what role it plays on my iPhone and what will happen if I turn it off.

[Just_Me_D]

You will not be able to access the files saved to your iCloud Drive from the device.

[Annie_M]

If you have a lot of photos on your phone or saved in texts, you may want to consider using something like Google Photos. It's free and automatically backs up all your photos so you can remove them from your phone. The best part of this is that you can still access them from the Google Photos app from your phone. You'll save a bunch of storage that way.

[Lee_Bo]

If you have a lot of photos on your phone or saved in texts, you may want to consider using something like Google Photos. It's free and automatically backs up all your photos so you can remove them from your phone. The best part of this is that you can still access them from the Google Photos app from your phone. You'll save a bunch of storage that way.

The only thing I don't like about Google Photos is while you do get unlimited storage, the photos are not the actual size the are on your device. They will be resized, hi-rez copies, but not the actual photo size. So if the photo on your device is 5 megs, GP will make a smaller sized, hi-rez version of that image. So before deleting the photos from your device, copy the ones you want to keep.

[Tartarus]

If you have a lot of photos on your phone or saved in texts, you may want to consider using something like Google Photos. It's free and automatically backs up all your photos so you can remove them from your phone. The best part of this is that you can still access them from the Google Photos app from your phone. You'll save a bunch of storage that way.

While the information you provide is accurate and good to know, iCloud Drive itself has nothing to do with photos at all, unless you manually store each photo on it.
I think you confused iCloud Photo Library with iCloud Drive.


iCloud Drive is a storage service provided by Apple within your iCloud account. You can manually store and access maps and files on it.
Disabling it only stops you from accessing and editing those folders and files.