Download all photos from icloud to mac or pc

An iPhone app like Gemini Photos will help you find and delete all the photos you don't need, so that only the good shots make it to iCloud. However, it's important to know that the originals are automatically moved to iCloud to save storage, and what you're seeing on your iPhone are lower-resolution previews. Alternatively, to view the images in iCloud, you can access them on iCloud. Uploading images or videos is easy with iOS or macOS. Providing the iCloud sync is switched on, it happens automatically.

On a Windows device and when logged into iCloud. Use it to upload images from another device to iCloud. Then do the following:. When you want to delete photos from an iPhone but keep them in iCloud, there are two ways around the issue of automatic syncing:. Keep in mind though that as soon as you log back into iCloud or switch it back on, your library will be automatically synced and the photos will reappear on your device.

You can switch off the automatic syncing any time. Simply reverse the steps you took to switch it on:. However, occasionally you might encounter problems. Here are some of the most common questions iPhone users have about iCloud Photo Library along with helpful troubleshooting tips. It really depends on the size of your library and your Internet speed. If nothing happens, make sure iCloud Photo Library is switched on on your iPhone.

Making sure everything is working can save a lot of headache. If everything looks as though it should be working, then it could be worth contacting Apple Support or an authorized repair service. What this means is high-quality versions of your pics will be uploaded to iCloud, while low-resolution previews will be visible on your iPhone. That means that when Internet connection is poor the previews don't load properly on your iPhone. To switch off Optimize Storage and keep the originals on your device, follow these steps:.

But it does mean that the images and videos you wanted will be available on your iPhone, until you either switch this feature back on or move them elsewhere and remove them from your iPhone. Are you still confused by how to copy photos from iCloud to external hard drive?

Follow this guide you can easily move your favorite photos from iCloud to any external hard drive. Also, this method has no limit on the number of Photos being downloaded. My wife subscribed to iCloud storage and I am trying to move all her photos to my PC so that we can switch to another cloud provider.

It boggles my mind that such a simple task as downloading all photos from the cloud is so incredibly difficult and convoluted with iCloud. I have always hated Apple products because as soon as you try to perform a task that is a tad more advanced than what a normal Apple user might do, you have to jump through a million hoops to accomplish it.

Click on all and they will come tumbling into your Pictures folder in your PC — full resolution. Male sure you have enough room. Addendum: Once you have downloaded your photos, simply log out of the iCloud-for-Windows account and uninstall the software. Your Pictures folder remain untouched. I have a Dell laptop running Win10 Home. With over pics, this was going to be infuriatingly teeeeeedioussssssss.

Using the iCloud app for PC is getting the job done so far. It is, however, taking a LONG time for the pics to transfer. Better the process be automated and time consuming, rather than having to manually manage every file transfer for that same amount of time. Also, I found the iCloud icon in my hidden icons tray, as opposed to the right task bar, because of the way I set up the laptop. Oh man this is one of the most frustrating experiences — I never leave comments usually only look at them for solutions to a problem.

However, I did find an alternative to selecting pictured one-by-one i. If you click one of these, all the pictures from the same date will be selected! It is a huge blindspot on the part of consumers everywhere. The rationale is to trap you in the Apple ecosystem. That has been the first priority for everything Apple has ever done.

Or better yet, run a free Linux OS off a flash drive 8mb will do , and move the files yourself. If you like what you see, install a Linux OS and dual boot. Linux Mint is easy for Windows users, Mint xfce version if you have an older computer. Based on this experience- first apple decides to turn on iCloud sharing for me when I updated my OS, then I find out that all my photos are now on the cloud which I never wanted , then I tired to turn off the sharing but apple gives no option to preserve the pics on my phone so deletes them the messages here are so confusing and counter intuitive that this happens , then i try to download over pics on the cloud and I Have to individually select them!

Are you kidding me? And to add more fun to the process, apple does not even display the name of the photo so it is extremely difficult to know what I have already downloaded except by trying to compare the images.

Bottom line, I am switching to android for my next phone. Install and setup the icloud sync software 2. Click iCloud-Photos in file explorer 3.

Select the the years you want in the pop-up 5. Some thing that should have taken 5 minutes to do has taken me about an hour of research. Even the Apple website help is useless. Upload Photos and New Shared Album are the only options available in the navigation bar.

There is no download photos and videos option. I have not read all the posts here so this may be a repeat, but I have found that the above method does not work on High Siera and OSX. But, it can be done using a mobile. I used AirDrop to transfer images directly from the phone that sent them to iCloud. For that you need Bluetooth which can also be a challenge sometimes, but, I have selected each group I needed from my phone and transferred them.

I shall disable iCloud uploads from now on. A real pain in every way. Very badly thought out — politics and restrictive practices — or just bad design? There is a solution. They called within 2 mins. Initially they were surprised how hard this was and then they put me through to specific Photos support and they were able to solve this. But … it involves creating a new Photos library on an external drive and downloading all your iCloud photos to that library.

From there you open that library in Photos and create folders of however you want to arrange your pictures years, subjects … whatever and export them out to wherever you want them to be.

You can then either leave them all on iCloud or delete them knowing you have a safe copy or copies elsewhere. My iCloud storage is almost full and I thought I would clean up by downloading and storing photos offline.

No such solution is possible; instead I have to upgrade my Storage Plan. How ridiculous. Criminal even. Ah well, it seems South Park had it right: be ware of Apple! Or, in other words, simply use Microsoft, it will work as designed. I would like to download videos that are on my icloud to my computer as well as images. However, the videos are downloading as images. The sound is there but no video. Can someone please tell me how to do this??? They said there is no way to do it.

I also lost photos when I let my iPad transfer some to iCloud because there was no space left. I can see some of them in a keynote presentation I made- those photos are not on my iPad and not in the iCloud backup.

They went missing when I allowed iCloud to back them up. I now want to get all the photos that are there out of there onto my laptop and then cancel iCloud. They are asking the engineering Dept what can be done. Apple should warn you that photos can vanish never to be found again if you use iCloud. Never again. Downloading pics from iCloud should be a no-brainer. So much for a well thought out eco-system. How do you select more than one photo but not all of them? This article said at the beginning it would teach us how to do that but never explicitly did.

I agree with Pete. I really wish that Apple and Microsoft would kiss and make up so that their products interact better. I also changed the download folder by clicking options next to photos. In that 10 minutes, it has created folders which, I assume, represent the year the various photos were taken. Not one photo has been downloaded to my computer!

I assume it just needs time — there are about 10, photos! Thanks all for the tips. If you have Windows10 and want to get a copy down on your disk from iCloud, this seems to be the secret. Were you successful in downloading all of your pictures?? Please do reply i really need some help here. It seems that there is no longer any way to download all photos.

None of the suggested methods in this blog work on my Windows or Mac devices. Where I had once thought Apple as a good platform for daily use, I am finding more and more reasons to continue with alternate operating systems.

If anyone finds a sure cure way of downloading all photos, please post. There no longer appears any way to select all, download all years et al without individually clicking on every photo, which I will do and then set all my devices to NOT save to iCloud.

Please help! I reached step 3 till then all was ok but no pop-up with the years I want. Whenever I click download photos I receive a message telling me that downloading will take a while the first time download. So I waited but nothing happened. No pause option either. After much searching in both this thread and other places, I finally found this bit of gold with instructions on how to easily download ALL photos from iCloud.

Open up photos app from dock, choose preferences. This will not work if your iMac has loads of photos on it already. It has become clear to me that Apple has disabled all the easy ways shown above to download all your files. They have disabled shift-click. They have disabled select all. They have disabled download all. They are trying to make it as difficult as possible for you to download all your pictures because that means your leaving.

The only way to do it is to select and download them one by one. They hope this discourages you from leaving iCloud. This is one of the most unethical practices I have even seen from a company and regret having bought any Apple product to begin with. Their management has the short-sightedness to think that this practice will keep you as customers but will in fact make you question your entire use of every Apple product and, if you have a brain, will realize that all Apple products need to be avoided because they are manipulating you.

We all need to go back to Windows and I made a mistake in ever leaving them to begin with, no matter how many mistakes they have made. Click on the iCloud icon at the bottom right of your screen, i. Now, the download will start, but you will not be told where the photos are downloading to, too much to expect I suppose. I poked around and found that they went to. Then delete them from iCloud to free up storage.

Thank you, CharlieATL, your instructions worked. It is not an instantaneous process, the folders downloaded empty at first and it was several minutes before photos started to appear. It will probaby take a few hours to get them all downloaded, so I will turn off my power saving settings. Almost photos and videos! Another issue I had is that when I selected the photos I wanted grouped by years was the only option available and then start download, I got a message that said there was not enough room on my pc for all the photos.

Not really true, but no arguing. Even if I only selected a year that had 2 photos in it, still the same message. I unchecked all other options uploading photos, etc except for icloud library, which I think is still needed for connection with my phone.

I have been wrestling with this for quite some time and was going to resort to downloading one at a time. I am very unhappy how all the different platforms are holding your data hostage these days. Now if I only knew how to fix the disaster that iCloud created with my contacts and calendar when I synced with Outlook I would be happy to never see an iPhone again! Spent all day on the phone with Apple Support and none of them had this solution.

Appears to be working. Like others, I got a bunch of empty folders first by year but now they are slowly populating.

Thank goodness for this response! Until I read your response I thought that I had to resort to one photo at a time. This worked for me! Thanks so much. It seemed like my computer was downloading something from icloud but I could not find the photos anywhere.

Saved me a ton of time! I totally agree! I have over photos, and I want them backed up somewhere other than the cloud! They have entangled you in their complex web and making it difficult to free yourself again. Its the typical heavy-handed Apple approach and is extremely unethical. You can download your photos from iCloud on the web. I downloaded my photos from iCloud. This poor behaviour of the icloud makes me really rethink my opinion about apple products. On an IOs device the storage of pictures is a two or three clicks story and sorry to say, but saving pictures and doing backups not just via itunes or the cloud it-self is a basic feature.

When will it be possible to download folders? When will it be posible to download all pictures with a simple click? I did not enable the Icloud photo … it enabled itself and now I cant seem to download all of the pictures in bulk.

I have the iCloud app for P. The solution is downloading the iCloud app for P. Then select Download Photos on the app icon. There is hope for humanity after reading these comments. Its am in Mpls and what started I thought as a simple migration from iCloud to my external hard drive has clearly become a disaster 6 hours ago! I wish I could find an updated article on this topic because like all of the previous commenters, with the latest OS X to El Capitan there is no such thing as a download all.

You download all the pictures from icloud as directed, you select the pictures on iCloud and download them all. Thank you all for all your great input as I am trying to figure out the best way to approach the issue. My question is can the photos, etc be directly transferred to external drive from laptop Macbook Pro?

Any thoughts?? Get them onto a hard drive and then never use iCloud again. The problem is once you allow iCloud to store your photos the full files are no longer on your device. I have never used iCloud for photos and I only did it because my new iPad said the storage space was full. No I have lost some photos. I know because they are still in a keynote I did but no longer visible on my iPad or the iCloud backup. This is really crazy. The supervisor thought I could do it by shift click.

He is asking the engineering Dept to figure this out and will call me back. If necessary I will manually transfer all photos to my computer. But what about the photos I lost? After this is resolved I will never use iCloud for photos again. Everything will be manually backed up to a hard drive and onto my laptop. A double back up is the only way to go.

You just have to remove the Apple obstacle, which is iTunes. An easy system: have one computer with iTunes that you use for updating and syncing, and other that you keep Apple-free in order to store your stuff on.

Shelly, great concept!!!! I am not directing this at you as you have found a reasonable solution and thank you very much for sharing it with us. This directed at Apple who have created the problem with not a good remedy. But now the issue was how to get photos from iCloud to my PC, not from my phone. I have used image capture to do this even with itunes you can do it. I hate apple now. It used to be that apple products were simple and intuitive and made things easier.

Not so now. I take all my photos and videos and I throw one copy on a desktop hard drive for easy access, one in a fireproof safe and one is kept offsite backed up every 6 months. I know. Crazy right. So it used to be easy. Go into Explorer. Copy and paste all into one drive. I then use All Sync to easily and automatically create my backups on my hard drives when ready. Then they change the folder structure to this silly create a folder for almost every file thing. I can work around that. Copy and paste.

Backup then delete to clean phone. Another change. Sure you can search as before but to and copy them? Also another folder change. There are now apple folders and cloud folders which I think cause an issue on the search. So now open all the apple folders. Copy all and paste.

Then repeat one folder at a time when ready to delete. Come on!!! Not even sure what to do with cloud folders but went in to delete the contents all as well. Try and delete those? No luck. And why not? Who knows. So now a bunch of empty folders that took forever to clean out that used to be quick and easy. So then I get a message my iCloud is full.

I can understand that. Everything is backed up in triplicate anyways right? Not so fast. Where are they? Can I access from my PC? I delete all in there. Lets go online. There they are. All photos.

Click the first and it highlights. I have 14, photos uploaded. In short I hate you now Apple. I have the iPhone 7 as does my wife so you have us for a couple more years. I have totally the same problem. I can not get photos from iCloud.

And also hate Apple now. So disappointed from them. You describe my situation exactly. Thank god I only have pictures; in a few hours I might be able to get them. Good job, Apple, in giving us more pitifully weak software. I am using Windows 10 Home pro. I am using Windows 10 Professional. Clearly this is an effort by Apple to force every user to pay for upgraded iCloud storage, since this is the most user-unfriendly application that could possibly be designed. I am not going to manually click on hundreds of individual photos, like some kind of savage beast.

Tip for other frustrated users — download the Google Photos app on your iPhone — free unlimited photo storage, automatically backed up from your phone, and you can actually get to your files when you want them. The free version of Google Photo changes the size of your photos when saved. That means you have no original resolution photo anymore. My Macbook with This is SO frustrating. I am running the latest version of iCloud. The only thing I can do is hold the ctrl key and hit every photo.

I hate iCloud. I want my photos back. I recently updated to the latest version of iCloud. I thought the problem was because my Mac is so old early and runs on El Capitan But maybe instead, it is another way that Apple can herd us into upgrading our iCloud storage. Maybe the upgrade removed those features. I actually know a super easy and perfectly workable method to bulk download all or any selected pictures from iCloud to both PC and Mac in their original format and size, and it needs the usage of an app — AnyTrans.

To be honest, it works decently for bulk downloading iCloud photos to my computer, in just one simple click and no need of iCloud Photo Library feature or Photos app. Your method works. I switched to Android a while back but my sister asked for my help. I even had trouble downloading 30 files at a time. Occasionally, you would only end up downloading of files and there was no way of telling which 23 files were downloaded and which could be deleted.

They are keeping us from selecting all of the images at one time because they are holding us hostage. Most people will just keep using them and put up with this.

Downloading iCloud for Windows was the only fix I could come up with. Seriously so annoying sometimes to deal with all the limitations Apple imposes.

Using I cloud is super annoying. You cannot mute-select etc. I went through downloading event by event, picture by picture — just to find out that then all the information in terms of when and where taken is lost?!?!?! Thanks for the tips. I am cursing my wife for insisting on owning an iPhone, especially since she relies on me to be her tech support on it.

It is a terrible device. So hate Apple. They are on iCloud, but no simple way to download them! So unreliable. No proper guidance to fix any of this.

I have the iPhone 5S and I have an old pc that has windows 7 on it. I can see all of my 10, pics when I sign into pc and go to iCloud. I just want to get all 10, pictures on my passport hard drive so I can delete off of phone to clear up more space.

Any ideas?? I thought I had removed it somehow by accident. EXACTLY, the inability to download or copy your photos as in the good old days means that you just have to keep increasing cloud size and giving more money to Apple. How much is that multiplied by millions? And what happens when you buy another brand of phone? Downloaded iCloud for windows, once its done you can download all at once, it creates folders by year which is handy. So far it looks good, I was worried once downloaded the resolution of em pics would be changed lowered , but they look good to me.

Any thoughts, any one? I tried that. Uninstalled icloud on my windows PC and reinstalled. The only thing that automatically downloads is the last couple of months of pictures. No way I can find to force the rest to download. They are holding the pictures hostage which makes we really want to chunk anything apple including their phones and ipads.

Most arrogant company I have ever seen. Cannot select more than one photo at a time. Used to be able to select multiples at once but no longer and I do not know what has changed. I need help! Has anyone else had this problem? Does anyone know how I can get the select photos option back? Thanks in advance! I think Apple recently updated Photos. The only way is to go one at a time. Photos downloaded from iCloud library are in png format. I used image conversion software to convert them to jpeg, but the result is not satisfactory.

My biggest gripe is with iPhones with minimal local storage, this sounds like a good idea. Now being a Windows users, it is nearly impossible to retrieve all my photos from iCloud Photos. The method to retrieve them in batches in not working for in in IE11 nor Chrome. Something is really rotten at Apple. I have about photos I need to pull off of here before they all go on my new iphone 7. I use imagecapture. This allows you to download multiple photos at a time and is very easy to use.

It is an Apple app that can be found in your Applications folder. I guess no one ever wants to address the issue about photo sharing on iphones. I have all of my photos in icloud, but I want to delete them from my phone because they are using about 5 gb, and yes I have done the conversion to make them smaller but again, they are still consuming alot. So I would love to be able to delete them, and have all of them also on icloud.

How can I do this. Well, I can move them all from icloud to somewhere on my laptop, maybe dropbox, but I cant select all to download either, so I can go through photos one at a time and download, unless someone has a work around, that works. None of the ones I have tried that are posted work. The same applies for music. So is there anyone out there that can help. I have windows 10, latest version of Icloud.

If you have a Mac and need to download all of your photos you do so quite simply by going to preferences of the Photos app and select the iCloud tab.

So that is not a solution. When I click on the blue download button, I do not get a box to confirm the download. I get the little strip at the bottom of the screen that ask me if I want to save or copy. I tried to download multiple photos from icloud as advised about half arrived in the format IMGjpeg etc and half of them arrived with a strange file name and an extension jpeg. Any advice anyone? I have many albums created from different trips locations etc. I might have albums created for a single year.

So iCloud is just a storage of my albums which works but not to share across devices as albums. By doing this is it possible to wipe my iCloud storage? But since I have no more iCloud storage I want to wipe it clean once I move everything to my mac.

I had about pic in my iCloud, I used this guide for selecting all pic on a Mac and It worked like a charm. I hope will help you as the same! Then use the same click, scroll to last pic, shift click again to select all in the iCloud and delete all. I do not see it there! I am SO frustrated with iCloud for all the reasons mentioned in this post.

Due to current iCloud download limits at the time of writing , you can only download up to photos at a time on your computer. On your Mac, go to icloud.

After you are signed-in, click on the Photos Icon.