
Not only that, but the photo actually won't move. But, if you turn that off then anything from that point on that you import will only be locally on your Mac. When you do that, you drag and drop a photo in or import it from any source, it's going to make a copy of that, put it in your Photos library and that will then be synced with iCloud. The way to do that is you go to Photos, Preferences, and there's an option here under General for Importing. But there is a way to add a photo here and not have it appear in iCloud. This is showing me directly what's available on iCloud and this is showing me my local library which is synced to iCloud. Anything I would add to one then would be shown on the other. You see, if I were to add a photo here then it would also appear here, which this is, showing the same album here, the test album, and you can see there's four items here and four items there. But there's a way to do it all in your regular Photo library. You have, maybe, a secondary library that's for work projects or maybe if you're a semi-pro photographer you have a library for each wedding or event that you take pictures for and that's not part of your main iCloud photo library. You have your main library and that's the one that's stored on iCloud.

Now one way to do this is to create multiple libraries.
ACTIVATE ICLOUD FOR PHOTOS ON MAC MAC
But every once in awhile you may want to have a photo on your Mac in your library that's not stored in iCloud. If you have two Macs, an iPad, and an iPhone your Photo's library should be the same across all of those. Video Transcript: So when you're using Photos app and iCloud Photo Library everything in your library is synced to iCloud and it's available on all of your devices.

Check out Using Referenced Photos To Exclude Photos From iCloud at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
