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How to back up iCloud photos to an external drive

You buy an external drive once, and your photos sit on it as files that open right in Finder. The steps below cover choosing the drive, preparing it and copying your iCloud library onto it.

Find out how big your library is

On your iPhone, open Settings, tap your name and choose iCloud. The space that Photos takes up there is roughly how much you'll be copying.

Choose a drive

Get a drive with room to spare, at least one and a half times the size of your library, because you'll keep taking photos. For 200 GB of photos, get 500 GB or more, and 1 TB is better still.

A hard drive is cheaper and is perfectly fine for an archive. An SSD costs more but copes better with being dropped. It won't make the first copy faster, though: the photos download from the internet, and that's the bottleneck.

Prepare the drive

If the drive already works with your Mac, you can copy files to it and it has enough free space, skip this step: there's no need to format it.

Which drive format works with iPhone, Mac and Windows?

Copy your photos

  1. Download PicFrom, drag it to Applications, open it and click Get Started.
  2. Click Save Photos and choose the external drive. PicFrom creates a folder named iCloud on this Mac on it.
  3. Click Continue and allow full access when macOS asks about your photos.
  4. Keep the Mac plugged in and connected to the internet.
The To card in PicFrom: the Photos disk with 2.20 TB free
The archive on an external drive named Photos.

At 100 Mbit/s, 200 GB takes about five hours to download. At 30 Mbit/s it takes almost a full day, so it's easiest to start the copy in the evening. If your Mac falls asleep or the drive cable comes loose, click Save Photos again and it picks up where it stopped.

Check the result

Open the drive in Finder. Inside the archive folder, photos are sorted by date, for example 2019/2019-05/2019-05-21. Open a couple of photos from different years and make sure they're full size.

iCloud on this Mac/
└─ 2019/
   └─ 2019-05/
      └─ 2019-05-21/
         ├─ 20190521_183012_IMG_2231.HEIC
         ├─ 20190521_183012_IMG_2231.MOV
         └─ 20190521_190547_IMG_2236.HEIC

Keep the backup up to date

After a trip, or just once a month, plug in the drive and click Save Photos again. Only new photos are downloaded, which usually takes a few minutes.

The summary in PicFrom: 38,000 photos in the archive, 214 GB on the drive, 0 not downloaded
The summary at the end: how many photos are in the archive and how many didn't download.

Don't rush to delete photos from iCloud

Delete a photo on your iPhone and it disappears from your Mac and from iCloud, because iCloud Photos syncs everywhere. For 30 days you can still find it in Recently Deleted, and after that it's gone for good. So check the archive first: the summary at the end should show 0 under Not downloaded and no Left in iCloud card, which would mean only the newest photos fit on the drive. Open a few photos and videos from different years, and only then clean up your library.

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