How to Download All Photos From iCloud?

Frustrated by iCloud’s 1,000-Photo Download Limit? Try Photos Takeout

Have you tried to download all photos from iCloud and discovered how difficult Apple makes it?

If you use iCloud Photos with Optimize Mac Photos setting, your full resolution photos and videos are stored in iCloud and their low-resolution copies on your Mac. This trips up the usual backup methods. For example, you can’t simply copy the Photos library from your Mac to an external drive, or use Time Machine. This will only save the “light” versions of the photos. To make a proper backup, you have to download the full resolution copies from iCloud.

The trouble is that iCloud Photos limits downloads to 1,000 photos at a time. If you have a lot of photos, this gets crazy. Here’s a post from an Apple discussion forum explaining the problem:

Doing it with Apple Photos

The “solution” that Apple’s community specialists suggest is: Log into iCloud.com/Photos and transfer 1,000 photos at a time, as a zip file. Do this 155 exports, then decompress the 155 zip files and copy their contents into a single backup folder.

What?!!!

Furthermore, after you finish doing the above, everything will end up in one gigantic folder. All those albums you had so painstakingly created in Photos will be gone!

That’s not all. Six months on, let’s say you have added a thousand new photos to your library and edited scores more. You now want to update your previously exported archive. Apple Photos offers no way to do this. You have to repeat the above exercise all over again.

Luckily, There’s A Better Way

The macOS app Photos Takeout ($8.99 on the Mac App Store) is a specialized tool for exporting the Mac and iCloud Photos libraries into regular folders. You can export all or selected Years, Months, Dates and Albums. The app preserves image resolution, formats, metadata and organization. It’s fast, and there is no 1,000 photos limitation.

You can also use Photos Takeout’s Incremental Exports feature to bring previously exported folders up to date anytime. The app finds and exports only the photos, videos and albums added or modified since the previous export – making the update process incredibly fast.

Apart from making backups, there are many situations in which you may need to export your Mac or iCloud Photos libraries, e.g. for:

• Offloading selected photos or albums to your Mac to free up space in iCloud,
• Switching to another platform or photo management program,
• Sending albums to non-Apple Photos users etc.

Photos Takeout is an invaluable tool for all these scenarios. One such use case is outlined below:

iCloud Storage is Full? Offload Something

A bloated Photos library is the most common reason for people running out of iCloud storage space. Although the Photos app doesn’t let you sort your library by file size, you can easily do this with the brilliant but inexpensive macOS app PhotoSort ($4.99 on the Mac App Store). It sorts the Mac and iCloud Photos libraries into SizeSort and QualitySort albums. SizeSort reveals the largest photos and videos by file size. QualitySort uses AI to identify your best shots (which you may want to Favorite, add to albums or share) and the worst ones, e.g. screenshots, memes, poorly taken photos etc. (which you may want to delete).