How to download all your photos from iCloud to a computer
iCloud Photos keeps your photos in sync across your devices. Delete a photo on your iPhone, and a minute later it's gone from iCloud and from your Mac as well. That's why many people want a separate copy on their own drive. There are four ways to download everything, and the right one mostly depends on how many photos you have.
What counts as an original
By default, iPhone takes photos in HEIC and videos in HEVC. When you download them, iCloud may convert photos to JPEG and videos to H.264 so they open everywhere. For an archive, the originals are better: they have full resolution, keep the date and place where they were taken, and a Live Photo stays a photo with a short video.
Option 1. iCloud.com
- Open iCloud.com in a browser, sign in and go to Photos.
- Select the photos. To select a range, click the first photo, then Shift-click the last one.
- Click the More button (…), choose More Download Options, then Unmodified Originals, and click Download.
The site won't give you more than 1,000 items at a time, and they arrive as a zip file. For a couple of hundred photos this is the fastest way. A library of 20,000 photos would take at least twenty rounds, and you'd have to remember where you stopped each time.
Option 2. The Photos app on a Mac
If iCloud Photos is turned on for your Mac, all your photos already appear in the app. But with Optimize Mac Storage turned on, the Mac keeps smaller copies when space runs low, and those originals stay in iCloud.
- In Photos, open Settings > iCloud and choose Download Originals to this Mac.
- Wait for the library to download. The bottom of the Library view shows how much is left.
- Select the photos you want, choose File > Export and pick Export Unmodified Originals.
The originals first have to download into the Photos library, so it needs room for all of them. A 300 GB library fits on a MacBook with a 256 GB disk only if you first move it to an external drive. And if a big export stops halfway, you have to start it again from the beginning.
Option 3. Request a copy of your data from Apple
At privacy.apple.com you can request a copy of your data and select iCloud Photos. A few days later Apple emails you a link to a set of large zip files, which you download and unpack. That's fine for a one-off export. Refreshing the copy every month this way takes a long time, because each request is prepared from scratch.
Option 4. PicFrom
PicFrom is a free app for Macs with Apple Silicon. It uses the iCloud sign-in that's already on your Mac and doesn't ask for your Apple ID or password. It downloads the originals one at a time and writes each one straight to the folder you chose, which can be on an external drive, so even a large library doesn't have to fit on the internal disk.
Photos go into folders named after the date they were taken. If copying stops, run it again and it continues from the same spot. A month later, another run downloads only new photos and anything that didn't download last time.
You need macOS 14 or later. PicFrom saves the original frame. If you cropped a photo or added a filter in Photos, the edited version goes next to it, with _edited at the end of the file name. It doesn't copy shared albums from other people, because Apple only keeps reduced versions of those photos.
Which one to choose
A few dozen photos are easiest to grab from iCloud.com, and a library that fits entirely on your Mac can be exported from Photos. If your library is bigger than the internal disk, or you want to refresh the copy from time to time, try PicFrom.