← Back to context

Comment by reconnecting

1 day ago

Surprisingly, there is no official way to download all (400 Gb) photos from iCloud. Here is an open-source command-line tool to download all your iCloud photos.

72 comments

reconnecting

Reply
kccqzy  1 day ago

That’s not true. On any Mac or iPhone you can choose the iCloud Photo Library storage option to download all instead of letting the system optimize the storage. And if you turn off iCloud Photo Library, it will also try to download it all. I know this because I stopped using iCloud Photo Library and that was how I got all my photos downloaded.

  • possiblerobot  1 day ago

    +1 to this method. After optimise storage is disabled on the Mac, wait for all photos to download. Then, open the photos library bundle and you'll see every photo there, full res. Copy them wherever you like.

    Also, if you leave optimise storage disabled and continue to use Photos, every photo will be cloned in any local or cloud backups of your machine. This strategy creates additional photo redundancy separate from iCloud while still benefiting from library syncing.

    • nottorp  10 hours ago

      I once exported my photos out of the iwhatever library. They weren't in the cloud, Apple hadn't managed to trick me into turning that on.

      What I remember is that I opened the library in finder and in mc, got scared by the readable-only-by-machine directory structure and used a 3rd party tool to export them to date labeled directories.

    • lostlogin  1 day ago

      This was my strategy too, but with a disgusting script which quit photos.app, rsync the photo library to a network share, then reopened photos.app so that it kept downloading from iCloud.

      Not sure if the open/close is required, but I didn’t want to find out.

      1 reply →

    • reconnecting  1 day ago

      Someone gave me a new iPhone (120GB) and a new MacBook Pro and asked me to download all their photos from iCloud. Long story short, after 120GB of photos were synchronised to the iPhone, the MacBook Pro refused to copy them, and now there's no storage left on the iPhone.

      Also, Photos on Mac doesn't have an option to download photos directly, so the only valid option Apple offers is to download them through the web interface (max 1,000 at a time).

      There is no official way to download iCloud library that is over phone capacity. Period.

      20 replies →

  • hu3  1 day ago

    that's good to know. can I then download the photos from iPhone to a backup hard-drive or transfer to a folder in my computer?

  • Nextgrid  1 day ago

    Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library - you're in for an endless game of spinners (it does some network IO on the main thread), "not responding" and memory leaks.

    But hey at least we've got Liquid (gl)ass now.

    • CharlesW  1 day ago

      > Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs…

      I use Photos for macOS daily and I've never run into a bug with my 50K+ photos library. (To be fair, Photos doesn't do that much, and I use it more as a master catalog with Aperture's spiritual successor Nitro.)

      > …and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library…

      Not sure why you would need luck to copy the "Originals" folder from the library package.

      1 reply →

reddalo  1 day ago

Technically, there is: users of the European Union can get a full export of all data that Apple has about them, including all the stored photos. It can be requested from here: https://privacy.apple.com/

  • ireadmevs  1 day ago

    How does the archive they provide look like? Many zip files? I would like to retrieve them and offload to another storage service but I don’t have local storage enough to hold all of it at the same time, unpack and then reupload. I would need to do it in stages.

    • Tempest1981  1 day ago

      Yes, many ZIP files. You can select the ZIP file sizes, from 1 to 25 GB, iirc. Although a few end up larger than 25 for some reason. And took 1-2 days for Apple to "prepare".

    • prawn  20 hours ago

      You can request a chunk size and then it prepares them. I specified max chunk size and it took almost a week to give me a list of file downloads from 45-60GB each. 31 zip files to download.

    • lostlogin  1 day ago

      While that’s a pain for you, it’s also a pain if they have multiple files for those that have enough storage.

      Photo management is a bit of a nightmare as it’s an awful lot of small(ish) files.

  • reconnecting  1 day ago

    It sounds really weird that instead of making a separate utility, or allowing you to download iCloud Photos in the native Photos application on Mac, Apple requires you to go through a legal procedure.

    I'm OK with clicking a button to download all photos to Mac, but there is no such button. Or maybe there was one previously, but it has now disappeared.

cdrnsf  1 day ago

I'm not sure it's surprising. Apple doesn't want you to leave and making something as important as your photos difficult to move helps with that.