+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 iCloud while still benefiting from library syncing.

Or use the great osxphotos tool that works with Apple Photo’s SQLite database to let you manage all the photos in your library.

https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

Demo .gif sold me

(Been meaning to make a software demo gif gallery, best way to understand many categories of apps)

I once exported my photos out of the iwhatever library. They weren't in the cloud, Apple hadn't managed to trick me into turning that on.

What I remember is that I opened the library in finder and in mc, got scared by the readable-only-by-machine directory structure and used a 3rd party tool to export them to date labeled directories.

This was my strategy too, but with a disgusting script which quit photos.app, rsync the photo library to a network share, then reopened photos.app so that it kept downloading from iCloud.

Not sure if the open/close is required, but I didn’t want to find out.

I don’t fully trust iCloud Drive / Photos therefore I use FSViewer to download all photos from my iOS device du jour (making sure to keep the HEIF formats), this way I get the Edited (slo-mo, live, portrait, usw) and pristine versions as Jobs intended. All kidding aside, after the gray area gate of 2017-2021 I had to find a more reliable backup workflow. As of today I only use iCloud Drive / Photos to extract some RAW photos that for some reason some picky apps don’t save to the photo album (looking at you ProCam 8.0). I made several tests including hash comparisons and imagemagick diffs and I am quite pleased.

> Photos on Mac doesn't have an option to download photos directly

Yes it does. It's called Download Originals to this Mac.

https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/use-icloud-photos-pht...

You keep asserting to the contrary, but I've been syncing my entire photos library to my Mac for years, since it was iPhoto even.

Obviously if you have a larger photos library than storage space on a particular device, you cannot synchronize the entire library to that specific device. e.g. my photos library vastly exceeds my iPhone 13 mini storage, so on my iPhone, I don't sync everything. But my Mac has 2 TB of storage, and Photos is setup to sync all my photos, and does so, reliably, and has been, again, for years now.

Additionally, unlike with this open source tool, I can keep advanced data protection enabled.

Please stop repeating your incorrect points that are contradicted by everyone else’s real experiences.

Yes, new ones will be uploaded. That doesn’t mean old ones won’t also be downloaded.

I have tried 3 different Macs with different versions of macOS prior to looking for a workaround, and everywhere the result is the same: old photos are not downloaded automatically from iCloud, and there is no button to start this process - for this exact reason.

Want to prove me wrong? Create a new macOS user and open Photos with your iCloud. It will be empty until you start copying photos from your phone. It will take much less time than arguing here.

You're arguing with a lot of people who have personally seen this work. You can listen to other people. You can also go to an Apple Store and let them show you what's going wrong here.

Perhaps no one here has tried to download an entire iCloud library at once, or perhaps size is an issue, but that doesn't change the fact that there is no download button for iCloud Photos and iCloud Photos Downloader simply solves this. That's what this post is about.

I can personally confirm I've downloaded an entire iCloud library at once, to a brand new Mac, using the 'Download Originals to this Mac' option. As have many others here, I would think.

That's literally what that option is for.

If it's not working for you, you might be dealing with a bug, or perhaps you haven't given it enough time to sync. If you go to Photos > Library and scroll down, it should show you the sync status.

Thanks, that was a relief because I realised I didn't see the sync status at the bottom. It appears that Monterey hides the status message at the bottom by default, and I had to pull the page down twice to see it.

Long story short, iCloud wasn't syncing photos "due to performance" and this message was hidden.

Thanks once again!

No worries! I don't understand why Apple is so averse to surfacing the status of things, especially highly sensitive and finicky things like online sync. It would dramatically improve the feel of the software if it didn't seem like it just inexplicably wasn't working half the time.

Happy to hear it helped. :)

iCloud Photos Downloader is an option, yes, but it is incorrect to say that Apple does not provide an official way to do this on Mac. Again, I direct you to the Apple Store so someone can show you in person, since you won't listen to anyone on here.

I confirm that you was absolutely right!

Photos on MacOS indeed synchronise photos with iCloud.

After our conversation I had tried to understand why I indeed don't see any status and I found out, that to get one in Monterey iOS I must need to scroll down of the collection and after, at the bottom pul whole page for the second time. Status message appears and it was saying that syncing was disabled due to Mac performance (I didn't asked for this).

Apologies, for misleading, code543 and thank you for consistence.

However, I must admit that I'm happy that found iCloud Photos Downloader as a result, also I liked that it's downloading all photos in date/folder structure.

Let me be one more voice telling you that you are wrong. I just did this morning.

In settings, "download originals to this mac", select all photos, file -> "export unmodified originals" will trigger the Photos app to download every file from iCloud into your local library (as well as exporting them to wherever you want)

I guess "there is no download button" but dude...I don't need iCloud Photos Downloader.

Thanks for letting me know. May I ask what macOS version you use?

Unfortunately, I'm unable to locate any button, status bar, or option to refresh or pull everything from iCloud in macOS Photos. There aren't even any details showing what percentage of iCloud is currently synchronized with macOS Photos. With nothing to debug, I can only conclude that for some reason the sync isn't working in my case.

It's great if this works for you and you don't need iCloud Photos Downloader, but for some reason I don't have that luxury.

Thank you! The status message was indeed hidden on Monterey, and syncing was blocked due to "Performance."

That doesn’t sound right. My photo library is larger than my iPhone’s storage yet downloads fine on my Mac. Just need to make sure “optimise storage” is enabled on the iPhone and disabled on the Mac.

Once everything’s downloaded on the Mac, you can either export through the Apple Photos menu or just copy the “originals” directly from the Photos bundle.

This works because you had synchronised your iPhone with your Mac previously. If you start with an empty Photos library and phone, it is impossible to put all the photos on the phone and thus transfer them to your Mac.

No, I’ve downloaded the entire library to a new Mac. It worked fine.

Thank you. Yes, indeed. I found out that Monterey is not syncing iCloud due to "Performance".

And people say Linux is hard to work with....

Okay, and if there are 300 or 500 GB of photos, how do you synchronise them with your iPhone?

You can't run random cli-tools on your iOS phone either.

that's good to know. can I then download the photos from iPhone to a backup hard-drive or transfer to a folder in my computer?

Yes over USB 2.0 until recently.

Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library - you're in for an endless game of spinners (it does some network IO on the main thread), "not responding" and memory leaks.

But hey at least we've got Liquid (gl)ass now.

Worked well for me for 70k photos but took a long time

> Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs…

I use Photos for macOS daily and I've never run into a bug with my 50K+ photos library. (To be fair, Photos doesn't do that much, and I use it more as a master catalog with Aperture's spiritual successor Nitro.)

> …and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library…

Not sure why you would need luck to copy the "Originals" folder from the library package.

> I've never run into a bug with my 50K+ photos library.

Have you tried dragging & dropping a photo from the Photos app to your desktop to export it as a file?

I just tried it and while the Photos app UI didn't freeze (I guess either my memory is bad and the spinner behavior was on imports, or they fixed it since 2 years ago), but it takes ~3 seconds for a single photo to appear as a file on my desktop (with no UI or any indicator that something is happening), and dragging & dropping 45 photos took over a minute (again with no progress indicator).

Granted, it turns out I didn't have "download originals" on (not sure if it was always like that or got reset during an update) so hopefully for Apple it's that - but I still think at the very least a progress indicator on what seems like a network IO operation is in order (and I wonder what happens if I interrupted my network connection during its operation - does it just silently never complete and my files never appear, actually show an UI, or just crash?).

Edit: well nevermind, despite all the files apparently exporting just fine, ~5 minutes later after initiating the operation I just got a hideous popup that some files failed to export: https://imgur.com/a/SFXZB5N

It's progress, at least it's the first indication in the UI that something was actually happening. You will notice that the error text is truncated, the only way to read it all is to resize the window (no hover text) and for some reason the horizontal scroll in this UI element does not follow your touchpad - you have to scroll, lift your fingers, and ~1 second later the UI suddenly applies your scroll operation.

Also, it turns out that resizing the window finally readjusted the table control and now the table actually matches the size of its container and isn't scrollable anymore. Which might be a good thing as it at least alleviates the bug mentioned previously, but then why did the control initialize oversized to begin with?

Again this is the kind of jank I'd expect from Linux, and nowadays maybe Windows. But not Mac.

> copy the "Originals" folder from the library package

My bad, I wasn't aware of said folder; I treated the "package" as an internal implementation detail equivalent to a proprietary format and wasn't going through it. I don't think it's a fair expectation to have (potentially non-technical) people to right click "Show package contents" while the usual double-click on the file just opens the library in the Photos app.