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Comment by 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/

10 comments

reddalo

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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.

  • einsteinx2  1 day ago

    > or allowing you to download iCloud Photos in the native Photos application on Mac

    Here’s the official documentation page for exporting directly using Photos for Mac without syncing everything locally: https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/download-photos-to-yo...

    You can also choose to sync all photos locally with Photos for Mac by setting “Download Originals to this Mac” as described on this page which is what I do to keep a local copy: https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/photos-settings-pht51...

    If your Mac doesn’t have enough space, export them to a USB hard drive or if you’re using the download originals option, first move your library location to the USB drive as also described on the link above.

    • reconnecting  16 hours ago

      You were absolutely right. Someone in the thread mentioned a status indicator, and it triggered me that I hadn't seen it at all.

      It appears that on Monterey I need to pull the page down twice to show the sync status, and when I found it, the message said that photos weren't syncing due to "Performance."

    • reconnecting  1 day ago

      Thank you.

      That's exactly what I expected to work, but for some reason this approach failed for me on a new Mac with an empty Photos library. I enabled "Download Originals," but 10+ years of iCloud photos never appeared. There's no manual "fetch all from iCloud" button, no progress indicator, no way to diagnose what's wrong - the sync just silently fails. Luckily, iCloud Photos Downloader bypasses Photos entirely and pulls directly from iCloud.