iCloud Photos Downloader

Post by lostlogin » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 8:37 PM UTC

possiblerobot wrote: post #18

kccqzy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true. On any Mac or iPhone you can choose the iCloud Photo Library storage option to download all instead of letting the system optimize the storage. And if you turn off iCloud Photo Library, it will also try to download it all. I know this because I stopped using iCloud Photo Library and that was how I got all my photos downloaded.

+1 to this method. After optimise storage is disabled on the Mac, wait for all photos to download. Then, open the photos library bundle and you'll see every photo there, full res. Copy them wherever you like. Also, if you leave optimise storage disabled and continue to use Photos, every photo will be cloned in any local or cloud backups of your machine. This strategy creates additional photo redundancy separate from…

Post by lostlogin » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

ireadmevs wrote: post #39

reddalo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

How 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.

Post by dangus » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #38

rgovostes wrote: post #35

My concern with backing up iCloud Photos with anything but Apple Photos is that there are some proprietary formats like Live Photos and slow mo video for which exports are lossy. Also, Apple Photos stores all edits non-destructively, so 'flattening' the edits into a single file for export is also a lossy operation. It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized sto…

Could the first obvious improvement please be its speed? My god. The local Time Machine backup is slower on a 10gb network than Backblaze over the Internet. It isn’t even close.

Post by lostlogin » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

cdrnsf wrote: post #3

reconnecting wrote: post #2

Surprisingly, there is no official way to download all (400 Gb) photos from iCloud. Here is an open-source command-line tool to download all your iCloud photos.

I'm not sure it's surprising. Apple doesn't want you to leave and making something as important as your photos difficult to move helps with that.

Post by mmh0000 » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 8:43 PM UTC

koolba wrote: post #40

mmh0000 wrote: post #31

I run this periodically from a little shell script; I "should" automate it, but time is scarce. ⟩ cat ~/bin/icloud_download #!/bin/bash mkdir "$(pwd)"/{photos,cookies} 2> /dev/null if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" ]]; then echo "need env ICLOUD_USERNAME" exit 1 fi if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" ]]; then echo "need env ICLOUD_PASSWORD" exit 1 fi podman container run -it --rm --name icloud \ -v $(pwd)/photos:/data \ -v $(p…

> icloudpd/icloudpd:latest Passing your raw iCloud creds into the unverified latest tag is fine until it’s not. Better to pin to a specific tag or hash.