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Comment by 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.

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kccqzy

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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.

    • lencastre  1 day ago

      I don’t fully trust iCloud Drive / Photos therefore I use FSViewer to download all photos from my iOS device du jour (making sure to keep the HEIF formats), this way I get the Edited (slo-mo, live, portrait, usw) and pristine versions as Jobs intended. All kidding aside, after the gray area gate of 2017-2021 I had to find a more reliable backup workflow. As of today I only use iCloud Drive / Photos to extract some RAW photos that for some reason some picky apps don’t save to the photo album (looking at you ProCam 8.0). I made several tests including hash comparisons and imagemagick diffs and I am quite pleased.

  • 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.

    • js2  1 day ago

      > Photos on Mac doesn't have an option to download photos directly

      Yes it does. It's called Download Originals to this Mac.

      https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/use-icloud-photos-pht...

      You keep asserting to the contrary, but I've been syncing my entire photos library to my Mac for years, since it was iPhoto even.

      Obviously if you have a larger photos library than storage space on a particular device, you cannot synchronize the entire library to that specific device. e.g. my photos library vastly exceeds my iPhone 13 mini storage, so on my iPhone, I don't sync everything. But my Mac has 2 TB of storage, and Photos is setup to sync all my photos, and does so, reliably, and has been, again, for years now.

      Additionally, unlike with this open source tool, I can keep advanced data protection enabled.

      13 replies →

    • fizwidget  1 day ago

      That doesn’t sound right. My photo library is larger than my iPhone’s storage yet downloads fine on my Mac. Just need to make sure “optimise storage” is enabled on the iPhone and disabled on the Mac.

      Once everything’s downloaded on the Mac, you can either export through the Apple Photos menu or just copy the “originals” directly from the Photos bundle.

      5 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.

    • Nextgrid  2 hours ago

      > I've never run into a bug with my 50K+ photos library.

      Have you tried dragging & dropping a photo from the Photos app to your desktop to export it as a file?

      I just tried it and while the Photos app UI didn't freeze (I guess either my memory is bad and the spinner behavior was on imports, or they fixed it since 2 years ago), but it takes ~3 seconds for a single photo to appear as a file on my desktop (with no UI or any indicator that something is happening), and dragging & dropping 45 photos took over a minute (again with no progress indicator).

      Granted, it turns out I didn't have "download originals" on (not sure if it was always like that or got reset during an update) so hopefully for Apple it's that - but I still think at the very least a progress indicator on what seems like a network IO operation is in order (and I wonder what happens if I interrupted my network connection during its operation - does it just silently never complete and my files never appear, actually show an UI, or just crash?).

      Edit: well nevermind, despite all the files apparently exporting just fine, ~5 minutes later after initiating the operation I just got a hideous popup that some files failed to export: https://imgur.com/a/SFXZB5N

      It's progress, at least it's the first indication in the UI that something was actually happening. You will notice that the error text is truncated, the only way to read it all is to resize the window (no hover text) and for some reason the horizontal scroll in this UI element does not follow your touchpad - you have to scroll, lift your fingers, and ~1 second later the UI suddenly applies your scroll operation.

      Also, it turns out that resizing the window finally readjusted the table control and now the table actually matches the size of its container and isn't scrollable anymore. Which might be a good thing as it at least alleviates the bug mentioned previously, but then why did the control initialize oversized to begin with?

      Again this is the kind of jank I'd expect from Linux, and nowadays maybe Windows. But not Mac.

      > copy the "Originals" folder from the library package

      My bad, I wasn't aware of said folder; I treated the "package" as an internal implementation detail equivalent to a proprietary format and wasn't going through it. I don't think it's a fair expectation to have (potentially non-technical) people to right click "Show package contents" while the usual double-click on the file just opens the library in the Photos app.