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.
That’s not true. On any Mac or iPhone you can choose the iCloud Photo Library storage option to download all instead of letting the system optimize the storage. And if you turn off iCloud Photo Library, it will also try to download it all. I know this because I stopped using iCloud Photo Library and that was how I got all my photos downloaded.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have tried 3 different Macs with different versions of macOS prior to looking for a workaround, and everywhere the result is the same: old photos are not downloaded automatically from iCloud, and there is no button to start this process - for this exact reason.
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.
You're arguing with a lot of people who have personally seen this work. You can listen to other people. You can also go to an Apple Store and let them show you what's going wrong here.
Perhaps no one here has tried to download an entire iCloud library at once, or perhaps size is an issue, but that doesn't change the fact that there is no download button for iCloud Photos and iCloud Photos Downloader simply solves this. That's what this post is about.
I can personally confirm I've downloaded an entire iCloud library at once, to a brand new Mac, using the 'Download Originals to this Mac' option. As have many others here, I would think.
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.
Thanks, that was a relief because I realised I didn't see the sync status at the bottom. It appears that Monterey hides the status message at the bottom by default, and I had to pull the page down twice to see it.
Long story short, iCloud wasn't syncing photos "due to performance" and this message was hidden.
No worries! I don't understand why Apple is so averse to surfacing the status of things, especially highly sensitive and finicky things like online sync. It would dramatically improve the feel of the software if it didn't seem like it just inexplicably wasn't working half the time.
iCloud Photos Downloader is an option, yes, but it is incorrect to say that Apple does not provide an official way to do this on Mac. Again, I direct you to the Apple Store so someone can show you in person, since you won't listen to anyone on 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.
Let me be one more voice telling you that you are wrong. I just did this morning.
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.
Thanks for letting me know. May I ask what macOS version you use?
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.
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.
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.
Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library - you're in for an endless game of spinners (it does some network IO on the main thread), "not responding" and memory leaks.
> Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs…
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.
> I've never run into a bug with my 50K+ photos library.
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.
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/
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
I've been using Mac since Mac OS X 10.4 (~2005) and was under the same impression.
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.
No, you are not correct. How many people have to tell you this?
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.
When you take a new photo, it synchronises with all your devices, and therefore you see it on your Mac, iPhone, etc. However, if you get a new Mac (I got one because my library was under capacity), Photos will not start synchronising your 10-year-old photos until you process them through the phone.
When you first turn on iCloud Photos, it can take a while to upload your photos to iCloud. You can continue to use Photos while your photos are being uploaded.
To have iCloud Photos sync photos to all your devices, sign in to the same Apple Account to turn on iCloud Photos on all your devices.
One of us is missing something.
In Photos.app I clicked download originals. The photos are there on my Mac. It’s bit gross to get at them though - right click on app > show package contents.
Are you wanting a way that doesn’t involve the photos app?
If you open the Photos app (macOS) connected to iCloud with an empty library, there will be no photos until you import them from your phone. Hope this is clear now.
iCloud via browser has a limit of 1k photos per download.
My bad — it appears that Monterey wasn't syncing with iCloud due to "Performance." Photos on Monterey hides the status message at the bottom of the page, and I had to pull the page down twice to finally see it.
i wrote the manual on notion and asked it to put it in a markdown file and fix my spelling and grammar. if you read the disclaimer full, i specifically state i did not use it for brainstorming or adding net new ideas
Ah. My bad, yelling at the messenger. But the actual "author", who might also be the submitter (nick = Nicola?), has some explaining to do. There's a lie in the submission title, and the same lie in the github readme intro.
Thanks for helping alert us all to the sloppiness and deceit. And thanks to all who flagged.
i genuinely wrote the thing myself. i wrote it in notion and had lots of spelling/grammar mistakes and no formatting, so i asked claude code to put it into a markdown file and polish the writing. im not going to sit here and do this myself bc this is not my full time job and im just trying to get my ideas out into the world
You almost had me there, I'll admit, but then I looked at your (short, new) comment history for a Poe's Law check. A much-needed perspective around here! Keep it up, and good luck staying on the right side of the site guidelines -- your shtick is close to the edge, but very refreshing if done well.
>"So please forgive any imprecision or inaccuracies"
Um, no? You (TFA author) want people to read/review your slop that you banged together in a day and let the shit parts slide? If you want to namedrop some AI heavy hitter to boost your slop, at least have the decency to publish something you put real effort into.
i genuinely wrote this in a day. ive been in ai for 9 years, well before chatgpt came out. i used Claude Code to turn it from my notion draft (spelling mistakes, no formatting, etc) into a well-formatted markdown file. you don't need to believe me, move on with your life. the guide is free and is meant to genuinely help someone use AI in a better way
The Gmail app on Android supports 3rd party email servers via IMAP and has done for as long as I can remember (I have Gmail accounts but my primary account is a self hosted one and I use the Gmail app for all the accounts)
The Gmail app supports POP, IMAP, MS Exchange, and (though it got bugged into re-downloading the entire mailbox every day) even old-fashioned MS ActiveSync.
You can disable the Gmail app and install something like Thunderbird seeing as this is just a normal Android phone (which, of course, will also show you your Gmail emails if you set it up to do so).
We’re working on an open-source product security platform (1) and are looking into integrating with ThingsBoard. This would help identify operator risk behavior, for example in cases of account takeover. Do you see any specific security features that are currently missing in IoT behavior/risk analytics?
This is an article of questionable value written by AI itself.
The real cost of 100 lines will be when AI occasionally passes secrets, or brings new vulnerabilities, that at the scale of writing code no engineer will see.
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