+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.
The entire Affinity Suite is now reduced to bait on a hook for an AI subscription service. This is enshittification. This arrangement will also undermine Affinity's credibility as a serious tool for work (and play!).
I just want to pay for nice software made by thoughtful people like a normal human.
I'd love to do that, but I haven't seen any projects that have the polish and cohesive vision that I feel pro art / design tools should have. Apps like Inkscape and GIMP have always felt pretty rough around the edges and unpleasant to me, in a way that money won't help.
i would gladly pay $500 for GIMP if i felt their developers would prioritize features that i actually need out of an image manipulation program. they never have and by the looks of things, they never will. it's too bad.
Check out NextDNS. It's easier than hosting your own DNS filter. It's got plenty of knobs and switches plus lots of blocklists to choose from. (The Hagezi lists are particularly good.) Also, if you run it on your devices (in addition to your router), it filters on any network you happen to join.
Is closing the door when you poop virtue signaling? Or are people really more interested in being seen closing the door?
I think when given a set of options they understand, many people will choose more privacy from companies and the government because that’s what they want. I think that’s especially true when they understand the actual scope and scale of the surveillance.
You might be right with respect to non-techie users. But, it's not about whether it merely works. It's about what we could be doing with modern hardware if we used it as efficiently as old software had to use its hardware.
What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?
> What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?
Not that many: An early 1990s PC platform could be thoroughly described in a 200 page book and you could write a boot loader for the CPU, a VGA driver, and drivers for the most common peripherals from scratch in a few weeks.
In fact, games of that era shipped with their own audio drivers, (C/E/V)GA libraries and peripheral support.
Today this would be a) impossible because many manufacturers (cough NVIDIA cough) don't even release OSS drivers and specs and b) individual programs don't own the hardware anymore - the OS does. Also the multitude of target platforms (CPU types, -core counts, and -speeds, graphics cards, peripherals, etc.) makes it virtually impossible to ship code that it optimal for each of even the most common combinations of hardware.
The final nail in the coffin of the "super lean no bloat why-not-just-unikernel-everything-for-maximum-performance" idea can be summed up in one word: cost.
Development costs would be insane if we started optimising every aspect of every program for performance (on every possible platform, no less), memory use, and (binary-) size.
And that's even ignoring the fact that it's more often than not outright impossible to optimise for binary size, runtime performance, and memory footprint all at the same time.
Plus interactions between programs (plugins, {shell-}extensions, data formats, clipboards, etc.) require "bloat" like common interfaces and "neutral" protocols.
Most of the myth of great "old software" comes from the fact that functionality was severely limited compared to modern apps and that many folks simply weren't around to actually see and feel how much some of them actually sucked.
Sure, Visual Studio 6.0 runs incredibly fast on a vintage 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 2GiB of RAM using Windows 2000 - but when it released in 1998 many PCs had a 60MHz Pentium 1 or a 100MHz 486DX4 with 64MiB of RAM and it ran like a three-legged dog with worms on these machines compared to the DOS-based Borland-C...
Speaking of which, remember when sometime around the 2000s all Borland Pascal program stopped working, because CPUs had become too fast (>200MHz IIRC)? That was because their runtime used a loop to determine how fast the CPU was, which caused a divide-by-zero on fast machines IIRC.
> And by 2000, everyone had a Pentium2 with ~96mb of RAM.
That's a bold claim! The PII was released around 1998 and you basically just asserted that everybody buys the latest CPU as soon as its released.
The reality is that most PC users never upgrade their machine and buy a new one instead. The average age of a PC is about 5 years and no, aside from enthusiasts nobody buys the latest and greatest as soon as gets released.
Businesses in particular hold on to their assets for some years due to depreciation (which incidentally is 5 years for PC class devices).
So in 2000, the average PC was 1995-level hardware.
I was there. In 2000 the average PC was 1997 era hw... with a Pentium2, AMD k7, or a Celero overclocked to ~450MHZ? making a great alternative to a Pentium2 and a Pentium III@450.
Windows 98 was on its peak and the Pentium MMX often was horrendously slow to start up things. Good with Windows 95, but by 2K everyone was onto 98/SE because of good additions and an easy PNP support.
W98SE was used even when XP got released and a few years more.
Also, your statement about the P4 with that huge amounts of RAM (2GB) is even more unusual than a PII in y2k.
When I had an AMD Athlon in 2003, I barely had 256MB of RAM. I stayed with that up to 2009 with Debian 4 DVD's.I tried some Fedora releases and they where a huge no-no in my machine, and Solaris was impossible.
Funny you mention Winamp - I stopped using Winamp ages ago precisely because its 2002(?) rewrite was garbage and didn't support the one feature I was actually using at the time (SHOUTcast)
The whole AOL/Time-Warner sellout debacle didn't help either.
The schools will argue that surveillance of students promotes safety and good behavior. That might be true up to a point. But, they're missing out on the opportunity to teach a deeper, more important lesson, which is how to behave when you're not being watched.
Would we rather live in a society where people are only doing the right thing because they're being watched, or where people do the right thing because they've internalized morals and ethics so it doesn't matter if they're watched?
I'd argue the latter is better. Merely pleasing your watchers is not personal responsibility. It's control and confinement to whatever you think the watchers want to see. But, when/if the surveillance rails come off, then what happens? Then we have people who have never stood on their own ethical two feet.
It's not just the subscription model that irritates people. The software itself has become irritating in various ways. Creative Cloud is a multi-app hydra that feels like it attaches to your system like a facehugger. Lots of people are looking for and finding exciting alternatives like Affinity Designer/Photo and Sketch. I didn't realize how slow the Adobe apps were until I started using Affinity. Those apps are fast. Not only that, but they are fun to use and got me really excited about creating things again. Super bonus: you just drop the apps in your app folder to install. Boom. Despite moving to the cloud, the Adobe apps feel legacy compared to newer options.
One reason why Adobe continues to make a lot of money is that Photoshop and Illustrator files are like what Word and Excel files are in businesses and universities: currency. People trade these formats around, which makes them way more durable. But that durability can't make up for a more important aspect of some software — especially creative software — whether or not people love using it. Go to the Affinity forums and witness the fire in people's hearts. I imagine there was a time when people felt that way about Photoshop. It's not that I want Adobe to fail. I just want great software.
All I'm saying is: don't mistake Adobe's ability to make money as a sign of love for its products.
Yeah, true. And, of course, Affinity has Publisher on the way next year. It's getting interesting. That completes the holy trinity. But, then there's After Effects. I'm not sure if that app has any serious competitors, now or on the horizon.
I've made that switch recently, after losing some stuff in Evernote for what I decided was the last time. I briefly messed around with SimpleNote, which was immediately doing weird stuff with tags (duplicating, not accepting changes). Then, I replicated my Evernote structure with folders and txt files in Dropbox. It works perfectly. And, there's a bunch of clients that edit txt files right in Dropbox, like Byword (OS X and iOS), Plaintext (iOS), Notesy (iOS), Ulysses (OS X), TextEdit + Spotlight (OS X), etc. You can switch apps on a whim and leave your data in place, and the syncing has been great. Simple, clean, and non-proprietary. I haven't checked into audio recording + Dropbox, but surely there are mobile apps for that, too.
Totally. I've got an encrypted sparsedisk image for anything that needs to be truly secure. That's definitely a caveat though, because its contents can only be edited from my Mac. On the other hand, I didn't trust Evernote that much either.
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.