How to Download ALL of Your iCloud Photos in a Few Easy Steps

Learn how to request a full copy of your photos that are stored in your iCloud account from Apple.

No exporting or downloading one by one is required. Perfect if you are wanting to organize your photos on an external hard drive or your computer. Or start using Adobe Lightroom Classic to manage your collection.

I recommend storing all your photos on an external hard drive so you don't use up space on your computer. And of course, backing that up for safekeeping.

Free resources:

For more tips and tricks on photo organizing subscribe to The Memory Curator.

[aaratrikalee]

Ohm my god, downloading 20k pictures was a nightmare and this was so helpful. Thank you so so much!!! ❤

[YashEngineer]

WOW, this is very very helpfull. Would any one know if this will download original size ?

[mehdib]

It works guys! Thank you for sharing this. Been looking for this for awhile!

[vSAM.]

Beautiful, I love this solution. I am a tech guy, but I love this elegant solution which saves me a lot of time. Thanks for this

[jonnij]

Thank you this is the best advice ever

[HH-mfqz]

Daaamn!! What a helpful video!! Thanks for making it!
Instant sub, just to support you and spread this video ❤

Havent tried it yet, but will try it when I find the time to

[craighassapakis]

This will be a God send if it works! I keep you informed. Thanks for the tip!

[Cottontowngal]

thanks so much for this. ive been tearing my hair out trying to get all my pics onto external drive.

[sctt]

Apple could just add a "select all" to their photo browser online but make it as hard as possible to get off their storage. Thanks for sharing this super easy process.

[quietspark]

Thank you! I've been looking for a way to do this for AGES and nothing has been helpful at all.

[asamalmkvist]

Thank you for this info! I have a question, I struggle a lot with copies, where is my original photo? I have Iphone, Ipad, iCloud and iMax and I want to sort my photos and don't know what happens if I delete in one place, do they all go away on every device? Hope you could give me an answer! : )

[traviswinn]

I have done this before, but my question is how to get the created dates to be accurate, that is where they really get you!!! This would be a really helpful video to create. After you download, the modified and created dates are all inaccurate except for in the file. Thanks!!

[ArvindNangia]

Will downloaded photos contain metadata e.g. date created, location, and info you may have added manually e.g. description or keywords? Requesting Apple is undoubtedly the easiest way but you’ll lose organization i.e. no albums. Exporting albums (or folder/album hierarchy, if you’ve created one) can be done with a third-party app like Photos Takeout.

[ebreevephoto]

There really needs to be a lawsuit against apple for making this so damn hard. Thank you for sharing this.

[johnpeskey]

I have a couple questions…I have about 190 gigs of photos on I cloud, our internet is:
‘Up to 1000 Mbps Download, up to 50 Mbps upload, we have 2TB of iCloud storage.
What would you recommend for the settings please?

[micantimica]

what about the quality of the pics, do they provide the zips with original photo quality or converted format ?

[thecoopstr]

What is your criteria for setting the gigbyte level. Individual files or the total amount of GB's you need to download from iCloud?

[AlmiandSebi]

I have an issue when downloading my Zip files regardless of file size. It says something like lost connect to server. Any ideas on how to resolve this issue?

[abca]

If i have a 500gb hardrive and need to download 800gb of photos from icloud is there an issue. Is there any issue with doing this with a huge amount of icloud data?

[sadpixiedust]

I hope this works! I'm gonna download 48k photos and vids 😥😥😂😂