Surprisingly, there is no official way to download all (400 Gb) photos from iCloud. Here is an open-source command-line tool to download all your iCloud photos.
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.
Not sure if the open/close is required, but I didn’t want to find out.
(Been meaning to make a software demo gif gallery, best way to understand many categories of apps)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes, new ones will be uploaded. That doesn’t mean old ones won’t also be downloaded.
Want to prove me wrong? Create a new macOS user and open Photos with your iCloud. It will be empty until you start copying photos from your phone. It will take much less time than arguing here.
Photos on MacOS indeed synchronise photos with iCloud.
After our conversation I had tried to understand why I indeed don't see any status and I found out, that to get one in Monterey iOS I must need to scroll down of the collection and after, at the bottom pul whole page for the second time. Status message appears and it was saying that syncing was disabled due to Mac performance (I didn't asked for this).
Apologies, for misleading, code543 and thank you for consistence.
However, I must admit that I'm happy that found iCloud Photos Downloader as a result, also I liked that it's downloading all photos in date/folder structure.
That's literally what that option is for.
If it's not working for you, you might be dealing with a bug, or perhaps you haven't given it enough time to sync. If you go to Photos > Library and scroll down, it should show you the sync status.
Long story short, iCloud wasn't syncing photos "due to performance" and this message was hidden.
Thanks once again!
Happy to hear it helped. :)
In settings, "download originals to this mac", select all photos, file -> "export unmodified originals" will trigger the Photos app to download every file from iCloud into your local library (as well as exporting them to wherever you want)
I guess "there is no download button" but dude...I don't need iCloud Photos Downloader.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to locate any button, status bar, or option to refresh or pull everything from iCloud in macOS Photos. There aren't even any details showing what percentage of iCloud is currently synchronized with macOS Photos. With nothing to debug, I can only conclude that for some reason the sync isn't working in my case.
It's great if this works for you and you don't need iCloud Photos Downloader, but for some reason I don't have that luxury.
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.
But hey at least we've got Liquid (gl)ass now.
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.
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.
Photo management is a bit of a nightmare as it’s an awful lot of small(ish) files.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Cmd+A > File > Export Unmodified Originals
The files are there on the Mac, they are there to download on the cloud (various mentions of method mentioned here).
Subject is to download photos from iCloud.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/photos/phtf5e48489c/ma...
As long as you are signed into the Mac with the same iCloud account used on the iPhone, this will download them all. No, you do not need to get them all downloaded to the iPhone ever for any reason for this to work. Period. You need to stop repeating that, because it is wrong. How many people have to say the same thing?
Yes, you will have to go into a hidden folder to access the Originals once they're downloaded if you want to copy them somewhere else, but it's like two clicks.
However, in reality, when you use the same Apple account on both devices with the Photos app on macOS (yes, with the 'Download Originals' checkbox enabled), it only downloads photos that you upload from your phone.
And if you look at the iCloud tab in the Photos app, it says 'Automatically _upload_ and store all your photos and videos in iCloud', so it works from Mac to iCloud, and doesn't help to download full iCloud library.
It absolutely works the way I said it does, because I have seen it work that way. Just because you accidentally turned off iCloud Photos in your Apple Account settings on that Mac (or some other similar issue) does not mean it does not work this way when properly signed in.
If you want something to try, go to System Settings -> Apple Account -> Photos and see if "Sync this mac" is turned off. It needs to be on. There could be other ways that this feature is disabled, but that is one of them.
Not seeing something work is not evidence that it does not work. You have not seen it work, but that is not proof it does not work.
Seeing it work is evidence that it works. I have seen it work.
Other people have seen it work that way, and their replies are all over this thread. Apple documents that it works this way.
Yes, it will upload photos to iCloud if enabled, but it also downloads them.
I hope I've made it clear now.
Are you wanting a way that doesn’t involve the photos app?
You can do that from iCloud over a browser.
iCloud via browser has a limit of 1k photos per download.
You don’t need an iPhone for Photos.app to work.
There are plenty of problems with Photos.app but the issue you describe isn’t by design.
Thank you for proving me wrong.
98,281 items to sync.
I hope it comes right quickly.
> Users of Google and Apple’s photo cloud services can now transfer images between them. It was already possible to export photos and videos from iCloud to Google Photos, but now it can also be done the other way around: from Google Photos to iCloud.
https://www.techzine.eu/news/applications/122196/google-and-... (2023 Data Transfer Initiative (DTI))