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Comment by 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.

26 comments

possiblerobot

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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.

    • reconnecting  1 day ago

      This is from the iCloud manual:

      > Any new photos and videos you add to Photos appear on all your devices that have iCloud Photos turned on.

      You have your photos because they are new. If they had been taken before, they would not have synchronised automatically with Photos on MacOS.

      12 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.

    • reconnecting  1 day ago

      This works because you had synchronised your iPhone with your Mac previously. If you start with an empty Photos library and phone, it is impossible to put all the photos on the phone and thus transfer them to your Mac.

      3 replies →