Comment by 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.

21 comments

reconnecting

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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.

    • coder543  1 day ago

      Please stop repeating your incorrect points that are contradicted by everyone else’s real experiences.

      Yes, new ones will be uploaded. That doesn’t mean old ones won’t also be downloaded.

      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.