5 Ways To Download All Of Your iCloud Photos

hi this is Gary with macmost.com let me show you five ways you can download all your photos from iCloud [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts now if you're using iCloud photos and you have the optimize function turned on then not all of your photos are going to be on your Mac some of them will be cached there others will only have their full resolution versions on iCloud until you go to view them this could be a problem if you want to backup or archive your entire photos library because some of the photos aren't actually going to be on your local drive for you to pack up so in your photos app if you go to photos settings then you look at iCloud you would have iCloud photos checked if you're using iCloud photos then you have two options download Originals to this Mac and optimize Mac storage now if you have it set to download Originals to the smack then your entire photo library all the original photos are on your Mac if you then go in the finder and find your photos Library which is probably in the pictures folder then this contains means everything all of the original photos are inside of this Library if you wanted to back this up to an external drive or just make a copy of it you could just drag and drop this one item to another Drive copy the entire thing and you'd have a complete backup but if instead you have optimized Max storage that means that some of your photos will be cached locally and other photos would just be available as thumbnails so you could see what the photo is and it wouldn't actually grab the photo until you went to view it and then it will quickly download it you may not even notice it's happening because it would happen so fast but if you then went to back up your photos Library by just copying this you wouldn't get the whole thing because only some of your photos would be local others would be stored on iCloud so if you're in that situation where using optimized back storage here are five different ways that you can get all of your photos into a backup or archive each one of these will work in some situations but maybe not others so you're gonna have to choose the one that's right for you so for instance the first one is simply to switch from optimize Max storage to download Originals to this Mac now this will only work if you have enough space on your local hard drive to store all your photos the reason you may be using optimized Mac storage is because you don't have enough space in which case this first option won't work for you but other times people just have this turned on because that's the way they prefer it or they don't need all their photos to be local but they have the space you can then switch to download Originals to this Mac give it some time to download everything it may take overnight if you have a huge library and then if you scroll to the bottom of your library you should see an indication here that everything has been synced if that's the case then you know you've got everything local now you can go to the finder and know that this Library file contains everything and you can duplicate it to an external drive to back everything up now the second option is unique in all these in that it may not work it's kind of flaky the idea here is that you select all of your photos so maybe use command a and you selected everything in your library there and then go to file and then export and then export unmodified Originals and when you do that you get to choose your options like whether to use the file name or name them all sequentially probably want to use the file name to keep the original file name go to export and then export these to an external drive the idea here is that you don't have enough room on your internal drive so you're going to export a copy of every photo to your external drive maybe create a new folder just for that purpose now if all your photos are not present what should happen is before it exports anyone it should download it but what if you don't have enough room to download all of your photos well that's where it gets a bit flaky because of my tests sometimes it seemed to download a bunch of them export them successfully and then as it was downloading more it would get rid of the cache of the other photos to make more space in other words successfully rotating toward your photos downloading some exporting them downloading more and exporting them and then finishing the job but other tests it would simply stop exporting and give you an error on the files that it didn't export so it definitely looks like it was not meant to work like this you shouldn't be able to just export all your photos if they're not available on your local Mac but I want to mention it in case you want to try it and then of course there's also the idea that maybe you could try selecting some I'm just because it's like 21 here but imagine selecting say the first 1000 photos and then going to file export export unmodified Originals export those 1000 then go to the next 1000 export those and so on so if you've got 10 000 photos in your library you have to do 10 different exports doing it that way may actually work and it might be worth trying now this third option may work a lot about it for you so you've got this Library here where you've got your settings to optimize Max storage so what you would do is quit photos and then launch it again but this time holding down the option key when you do that you're going to get a list of libraries to choose from and you can also create new so create a new library maybe call it backup and take this backup library and put that on your external drive I'm going to stick it in the folder here I've made called temp and I'm going to select OK and what this does is it creates a brand new photos Library so you're no longer looking at your system Library the one that contains all your iCloud photos but if you go to photo settings at this point then go to General and under General select use this Library as your system Library so you're switching which library is your system Library you're switching it to this empty one that's on your external drive so now you can see it's pointed there then go to iCloud and turn on iCloud photos and select ok and now for this one turn on download Originals to this Mac so the idea here is you've got enough room in your external drive to hold everything you've just created an empty library and you've said this is now my iCloud Library that's what's going to happen is it's going to download all your photos from iCloud so it's going to be a massive download maybe overnight for a lot of people and this new library is going to have everything it's just going to be on your external drive instead of your other library on your internal drive and I could see here at the bottom it says syncing with iCloud and you can see now the sync is done and now it says downloading 449 448 Etc photos so when that's finished I'll have a complete library on my external drive and then I'll be able to relaunch photos again with the option key and switch back to the internal Library set that as my system library and let that sync and then I'm back to how I was before but now I've got this backup Library sitting on my external drive as well now here's another method that just uses your web browser if you go to icloud.com you can sign into your iCloud account one of the web apps that you've got here is the photos app so now you're looking at a web-based version of your photos Library you could think of this as directly accessing the photos in iCloud instead of doing it through an app now you could select all your photos here I can do command a and I can download them I click this button here and then it'll allow me to download them it seems like this should be the best way to do it you can just go here and just download copies to any location you want except that it's limited to a thousand at a time so you could just select your first 1000 photos export those the next 1000 and so on now it might take a little time but if it's a once a year backup of your photos to an external drive that might be fine so now I've saved the best for last this one is to use a special feature that apple offers to allow you to download your entire iCloud photo library the only disadvantage to this is It's not instant it's going to take a few days to go through the process so you want to go to privacy.apple.com and you want to sign in with your Apple ID then look for get a copy of your data and click on the link there then you can select what data to get a copy of so we're going to go and select iCloud photos just check that and then go to the bottom and say continue now you get to choose a file size it's going to break this down into these compressed files at a certain size the largest is 25 gigs so you probably want to choose that for photos you may still end up getting many of these if you've got say 100 or 200 gigabytes of photos and then you're going to click complete request then it's going to warn you it's going to take up to a week for me it took a few days then I got this email here saying my download is ready and I was able to click get your data to get it the result was a zip file when I unzipped it I had a folder called iCloud photos and in there I added photos and you can see all the photos with the original names you can see there's a folder for recently deleted a folder for albums that had CSV files that specified which photos were in which album and the same thing for memories as well then even a zipped file inside of that for shared albums so this is a nice little package for a backup now there is one extra one I want to point out if you go into privacy.apple.com to transfer a copy of your data you go into there and the only option is to transfer all your photos to Google photos so you can have apple transfer all your iCloud photos to Google photos and you can use Google photos as your backup or use some method of extracting all your photos from Google photos so there are several ways to get a backup or a second copy of all of your photos out of iCloud photos thanks for watching [Music] if you like this video click the Thumbs Up Button below to let me know I publish new tutorials each weekday hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out

Channel: macmostvideo

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Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023