I have turned off iCloud Photos and now have 30 days to download these. However, I cannot find any way to download them to my iPad. It is more than 5000 images. There is no option to download when I go to my iCloud on my iPad. I took most of the photos with my iPhone. However there is also no option to download onto my iPhone. I’m running hot latest OS on both devices. I also have a MacBook Air using Ventura. How can I get my iCloud Photos to my iPad, iPhone or MacBook?
I have a 200 GB iCloud storage account. Using photos on iCloud quickly fills this storage and I don’t want to go to a more expensive account.
—–
Mike W
You would need to use your MacBook Air to do this. Turn back on iCloud Photos on your MacBook Air, then turn OFF the "Optimize" feature for iCloud Photos. Then wait for all photos to download and populate your Photos Library. Then you can switch off iCloud Photos again. Opt to keep the photos on your Mac if you are asked. Then confirm that you have all of your photos on your MacBook Air.
BTW, 200 GB is plenty of space for way more than 5,000 photos. My 35,000 photos are less than that. Maybe you have just a few videos in there that are taking up most of the space? I recommend keeping your photos in iCloud, and maybe moving the videos out of iCloud to files on your drive. Otherwise, you have to go back to manually syncing your photos between devices and downloading photos from your iPhone after you take them to your Mac. I don't know about you, but I could never go back to that.
Thanks Gary. I did use the MacBook Air to download the images in iCloud. It creates a zip file which I easily expand to a folder and then I just drag and drop the photos to Photos on the MacBook. I did have videos included, which almost certainly explained the large amount of data. However, of the 200Gb storage, about half is used for backups of my iOS devices (iPad and iPhone). As far as manually sending images to my MacBook, it’s not that much of an inconvenience.
Very useful post as I had the same question ❓