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Technically, there is: users of the European Union can get a full export of all data that Apple has about them, including all the stored photos. It can be reque
by reddalo 9mo ago
Technically, there is: users of the European Union can get a full export of all data that Apple has about them, including all the stored photos. It can be requested from here: https://privacy.apple.com/ https://privacy.apple.com/
- catskull 9mo agoI was able to request a photo dump as a non-EU customer using this link.
- ireadmevs 9mo agoHow does the archive they provide look like? Many zip files? I would like to retrieve them and offload to another storage service but I don’t have local storage enough to hold all of it at the same time, unpack and then reupload. I would need to do it in stages.
- lostlogin 9mo agoWhile that’s a pain for you, it’s also a pain if they have multiple files for those that have enough storage. Photo management is a bit of a nightmare as it’s an awful lot of small(ish) files.
- Tempest1981 9mo agoYes, many ZIP files. You can select the ZIP file sizes, from 1 to 25 GB, iirc. Although a few end up larger than 25 for some reason. And took 1-2 days for Apple to "prepare".
- prawn 9mo agoYou can request a chunk size and then it prepares them. I specified max chunk size and it took almost a week to give me a list of file downloads from 45-60GB each. 31 zip files to download.
- reconnecting 9mo agoIt sounds really weird that instead of making a separate utility, or allowing you to download iCloud Photos in the native Photos application on Mac, Apple requires you to go through a legal procedure. I'm OK with clicking a button to download all photos to Mac, but there is no such button. Or maybe there was one previously, but it has now disappeared.
- einsteinx2 9mo ago> or allowing you to download iCloud Photos in the native Photos application on Mac Here’s the official documentation page for exporting directly using Photos for Mac without syncing everything locally: https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/download-photos-to-your-mac-from-icloud-phtfa50fd1ec/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/download-photos-to-yo... You can also choose to sync all photos locally with Photos for Mac by setting “Download Originals to this Mac” as described on this page which is what I do to keep a local copy: https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/photos-settings-pht5156cc968/11.0/mac/26 https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/photos-settings-pht51... If your Mac doesn’t have enough space, export them to a USB hard drive or if you’re using the download originals option, first move your library location to the USB drive as also described on the link above.
- reconnecting 9mo agoThank you. That's exactly what I expected to work, but for some reason this approach failed for me on a new Mac with an empty Photos library. I enabled "Download Originals," but 10+ years of iCloud photos never appeared. There's no manual "fetch all from iCloud" button, no progress indicator, no way to diagnose what's wrong - the sync just silently fails. Luckily, iCloud Photos Downloader bypasses Photos entirely and pulls directly from iCloud.
- reconnecting 9mo agoYou were absolutely right. Someone in the thread mentioned a status indicator, and it triggered me that I hadn't seen it at all. It appears that on Monterey I need to pull the page down twice to show the sync status, and when I found it, the message said that photos weren't syncing due to "Performance."
- SchemaLoad 9mo agoDoesn't work if you have Advanced Data Protection (end to end encryption) enabled.