It is possible that for some time, an alert has invaded your devices: iCloud is full and you need to increase the space or clean up what you store there. No matter how long you try to avoid it: the cleaning has to be done. we will explain how to download icloud photos from mac so you can save them elsewhere.
How to Download Photos from iCloud if You Have It Enabled on Your Mac
The most common, if you haven’t touched any settings on your Mac, is that iCloud Photo Library is cloud-enabled. You can check this from the Photos program itself, in its Preferences (you can open them by pressing CMD + ,):
In this case, the process is simple: just export everything you have in the Photos app to a local Finder folder
To do this, open Photos and press CMD+A to select your entire iCloud Photo Library (or manually select only the photos you want). Then click on the File menu, then choose one of the two options from this sub-menu:
- ‘Export N items’ will export all those photos and videos in their original quality. But if you edited a photo using the app’s own tools, the edited image will be exported and not the original.
- ‘Export original without modification for N elements’ It will export all images and videos, but ignoring any edits you have made to them and therefore taking the originals without editing them.
In one of the two options that we have selected, a dialog box will appear with which we can select the aspect ratio and the quality of the videos that we want to export. Select the highest quality to export the video in its original resolution:
Also enable the option include photo location in image metadata
Finally, pay attention to the last option. If you don’t want all the photos exported to a single directory without any kind of organization, you can select “Moment Name” so that a subfolder is generated for each Moment you have in the photo library. It is recommended if you have several thousand photographs to export.
Once you click to accept, the export process will begin. Be patient, because if there are a lot of photos it will take time. Make sure you have enough space on your Mac to export them all, or do it directly to an external hard drive with space so there’s no problem. Remember that albums and slideshows you’ve created in Photos they won’t be exported and will be a layer of organization that you lose outside of the app.
How to Download Photos from iCloud if You Have It Disabled on Mac
If iCloud isn’t enabled on your Mac, you can download a copy of the photos you have in the cloud through the Photos section of the iCloud.com website. Once connected, you can select the photos you want and tap the cloud icon with the down arrow to download them:
The bad news is that with this method you cannot download all the photos at once: you have to do it in groups of 500 photos. So, if you have tens of thousands of them, you can temporarily enable iCloud Photo Library on your Mac to make it more convenient by following the steps given above.
Whichever way you do it, when you’re done saving all your downloaded photos to a local directory or external drive, you’ll be able to delete the copies you have in iCloud without fear and free up that space in the cloud.
