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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

When downloading directly from iCloud.com that's true (and annoying), but you can also bulk download all of the originals via Photos.app (making sure to check "Download Originals to this Mac" rather than "Optimize Mac Storage").

Unfortunately, that wouldn't work for my wife's situation. Her computer is one of those MacBooks with a 256GB drive, and only one USB-C port. So the amount of data stored in her iCloud photos would easily overload her drive, and if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed.

I'm not interested in buying a hub for a one-off operation.

I tried afp:// and smb:// mounting Photos libraries on large drives on other machines on the LAN, then downloading the photos to those, but that turned out to be excruciatingly slow, and very unreliable.

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If the other machines on your LAN include Windows or Linux boxes, you could use Photos.app in a macOS VM to bulk download the files; here are some projects that make it easy:

macos-virtualbox: "Push-button installer of macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra guests in Virtualbox for Windows, Linux, and macOS" https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

macOS-Simple-KVM: "Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM." https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM

This is not directly aimed at you but rather the hilarity of the situation.

> only one USB-C port [...] if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed.

Absolutely crazy how we ended up accepting supposedly professional devices that work like this. Choose between having power or being able to use a external hard drive (unless you purchase accessories of course). Mean while, desktop computers are built to be customizable in every single way.

I agree that it was outrageous that the MacBook (2015-2019) only had one USB port. However, Apple never called it Pro. The MacBook Pro has at least 2 USB ports.

> However, Apple never called it Pro.

I think in the marketing material, Apple tends to call everything they do "for professionals", not just the line of hardware with "Pro" in its name.

No, this was just a plain consumer-level MacBook, sold alongside both the Pro and the Air line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2015–2019)

A laptop can be customized with accessories, same as a desktop can.

Admittedly an additional cost/annoyance, it is possible to buy USB-C "docks" that can supply power to your laptop while also plugging in another USB device.

Library view, All Photos, then click and shift-click to select a range of photos, File -> Export Unmodified Original. That way you can export a chunk at a time, as long as you keep track of which ones you stopped at for each batch.

But if your library is mostly on the cloud it gets worse.

And how is this the best solution in 2021?

> I'm not interested in buying a hub for a one-off operation.

If cost is the issue, there are a lot of off-brand hubs. I bought one for $15 of Amazon. So far no issues.

One of PC Magazine Editor's Choice name brand hubs with support for power delivery retails at $30.

I did the SMB share (over WiFi, to a NAS) you mentioned and backed up my library without too much trouble. This was about 120GB.

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