As your storage needs increase, iCloud gets expensive. As of June 2025, iCloud U.S. pricing per month is: 50GB: $0.99, 200GB: $2.99 2TB: $9.99 6TB: $29.99, and 12TB: $59.99. Whoa! That’s a lot once you get above 2TB. Also, if you’re a super-heavy user or data hoarder, 12TB is the max you can get. The good news is, it’s easy to reduce iCloud storage, downgrade your plan, and save money.

Here’s a typical use case for a professional photographer (and an easy solution):

“I have 11 TB of video and RAW photos taken over 25 years. I store these in iCloud, which costs a little fortune – $59.99 a month. My worry is that I’ll soon hit 12TB and not be able to store more. I’m looking at Amazon Photos which offers unlimited storage. But it allows only albums, not the folder > albums structure I use to organize my professional and client portfolios. And it’ll be a BIG hassle to move.

Further, I want to be able to send photos to clients as lower resolution 2mb JPGs. Is there an easy way to bulk-convert and keep copies of all RAW files as JPGs?”

Yes, you can. Here’s how:

First things first. Surely you know that iCloud is a syncing service, not a backup? If your entire portfolio isn’t organized and saved in external hard drives, that’s absolutely the first thing you must do. In Photos on Mac, go to Settings > iCloud, and check if it’s set to Download Originals. If yes, creating a backup on an external drive or SSD is easy: Either use Time Machine or copy the Photos library to the drive. If, however, it’s on Optimize Mac Storage, those two methods won’t work. In this case, you must download the full resolution photos from iCloud. Use Photos Takeout to download them from iCloud to external drive, preserve resolution, folder > albums nested structure, file formats and metadata.

You pay $59.99 a month to keep 11TB worth of photos in iCloud and will soon max out at 12TB. Do you really need all those full resolution photos in iCloud? Offloading 2-3TB of the largest files could get you down to 9-10TB and free up enough headroom for 4-5 years. You may even offload a lot more (keeping only what you REALLY need online) to get down to iCloud’s 6TB or even 2TB tier, saving more money.

Find Largest Photos and Videos

“How do I identify the largest files“, you ask, “Photos doesn’t let me sort by file size ☹️.”

Get PhotoSort ($4.99). It sorts Mac and iCloud Photos by file size and quality. Review your largest files, select the ones you haven’t accessed or used in ages, and put them in an album named “Less Used”. Keep adding photos and videos to it until you reach your reduction target.

Create Lower Resolution Versions

Next, create a lower-resolution archive, as follows: Create a shared album for each of your albums, and copy photos from your main library into these shared albums. This will automatically convert them to JPG and reduce their size to 2048px along the longer edge. And it’s free – shared albums don’t count towards your iCloud storage. You can use these to send to your clients.

Reduce iCloud Storage

Now that you have an offline backup of your full resolution videos and RAW photos, and low resolution copies of your entire library, go ahead and permanently remove the unwanted items from your Photos library as well as iCloud storage as explained here.

Check your reduced iCloud storage (Give it a few hours to show the updated position), and downgrade iCloud plan to a lower, less expensive tier. You can do this by going to Settings > iCloud > Manage Plan > Downgrade Options.

Easy – isn’t it?

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