5 Ways To Download All Of Your iCloud Photos

If you need to backup your Photos library but are using the Optimize option, it may seem impossible. But there are at least 5 ways to get all the photos from iCloud safely backed up to an external drive or other location.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you five ways you can download all your photos from iCloud. 
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Now if you're using iCloud Photos and you have the optimizer 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 backup. 
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. You have two options. Download originals to this Mac and Optimize Mac Storage. Now if you have it set to Download Originals to this Mac then your entire Photo Library, all the originals 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 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 Optimize Mac Storage that means that some of your photos will be cached locally and other photos would just be available as Thumbnails so you can see what the photo is and it wouldn't actually grab the photo until you went to view it. Then it will quickly download it. You may not even know this is happening because it happens so fast. But if you then went back to 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 in iCloud. 
So if you're in this situation where using Optimize Mac Storage here are five different ways to 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 going to have to choose the one that is right for you. So, for instance, the first one is simply to switch from Optimize Mac 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 Optimize 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 is the way they prefer it or they don't need all their photos to be local but they have this 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 is the case then you know that 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. Then go to File and then Export. Then Export Unmodified Originals. When you do that you get to choose your options, like whether to use the File Name or name them all sequentially. Probably you 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 then what should happen is before it exports any one 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 in 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 through your photos, downloading some, exporting them, downloading more and exporting them and then finishing the job. But in 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 are not available on your local Mac. But I want to mention it in case you want to try it. Then, of course, there's also the idea that maybe you could try selecting some, I'm just going to select 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 ten different exports. Doing it that way may actually work and it might be worth trying. 
Now this third option may work a lot better for you. So, you've got this library here where you've got your Settings to Optimize Mac 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. 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 made called Temp. I'm going to select OK. What this does 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 Photos, 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 could see it's pointed there. Then go to iCloud and turn on iCloud Photos. Then select OK. 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 said this is now my iCloud Library. So what's going to happen is it is going to download all your photos from iCloud. So it is going to be a massive download, maybe overnight for a lot of people. This new library is going to have everything. It is just going to be on your external drive instead of your other library on your internal drive. I can see here at the bottom it says syncing with iCloud. You can see now the sync is done and it now says downloading 449, 448, etc., photos. So when that is finished I'll have a complete library on my external drive. 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. Then I'm back to where 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 a web browser. 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 can think of this as directly accessing the photos in iCloud instead of doing it through an app. Now you can select all your photos here. I can do Command A and I can download them. Click this button here and then it will allow me to download them. It seems like this should be the best way to do it. You could just go here and just download copies to any location you want. Except that it is limited to a 1000 at a time. So, you can just select your first 1000 photos, export those, the next 1000, and so on. It might take a little time but if it is 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. 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. 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 GB. 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 GB of photos. Then you're going to click Complete Request. Then it is going to warn you it is 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 had photos and you could see all the photos with the original names. You could see there's a folder for Recently Deleted. A folder for Albums that had CSV files that specified which photos were in which album. The same thing for Memories as well. Then even a zip file inside of that for Shared Albums. So this is a nice little package for a backup. 
Now there is on extra one I want to point out. If you go into Privacy.apple.com to transfer a copy of your data, go into there and the only option is to transfer all your photos to Goggle Photos. So you can have Apple transfer all your iCloud Photos to Goggle Photos and you can use Goggle Photos as your backup or use some method of extracting all your photos from Goggle 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.

Comments: 8 Responses to “5 Ways To Download All Of Your iCloud Photos”

NickG

2 years ago

Don't you loose your “edits“ with most of these methods?

Gary Rosenzweig

NickG: Yes, so choose carefully if you want to keep edits. But most of the time it is all about having a good backup in case of a disaster.

Carl S.

1 year ago

If I choose option #3 will the Photo Library I create on the external drive be updated every time the drive is connected or will I need to open Photos and switch to the alternate library in order for the photos on the external drive to sync with iCloud? I (my wife) has 40K photos in iCloud!
Thanks

Carl: No. You'd need to switch to that library. But I wouldn't do it that way. If you delete a photo from your library then re-syncing to the old library would bring it back. There would also be conflicts between edits. Only do that once to make a backup. If you need to make a duplicate as a backup. If you want to do it again, create a new library and do it again with a fresh new library.

Frank

Great video - and I wanted to put in a shameless plug for the more tech savvy users who are trying to achieve this: There are open source tools available to perform this tasks automatically without using a dedicated Mac app (so it could be run from a NAS) enabling a continuous backup.

I'm currently building one solution that tries to achieve this: icloud-photos-sync (find it on Github) - it is still WIP but already working well enough for my personal library.

Mark

If I created a new library on an external disk, then said "use this library for iCloud", I would certainly be afraid that Apple would make my iCloud Photos library look like my new (empty) library! Thanks for clarifying Apple's behavior on this. (I would have been afraid to do this with my real Photos library!)

Maria

8 months ago

great video, can you do a video about Text messages being saved? I have 500MB of old messages, and I haven't deleted them because I want to keep all the pictures. Is there a way I can just back up the pictures in the messages?

Maria: Likely you don't have anywhere near 500MB of messages. There are probably some messaged images and videos that are using that space. In the Messages app on your Mac, go to the conversation you want, click the "i" button, go to the Photos section and click Show More. Then select any you want and then Control+Click on them and you can save, delete and other actions. But for the future make sure you save any images/videos when you get them, keeping things lean.

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5 Ways To Download All Of Your iCloud Photos

Comments: 8 Responses to “5 Ways To Download All Of Your iCloud Photos”

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