downloading photos from iCloud online vs exporting from app

Sam2392 said: I would quite like to export them off the Photos application on my Mac instead, but it is only letting me do one at a time.

I don't get what you're doing. If I select a bunch of pictures in Mac Photos and go to File>Export,

it tells me about exporting, in this case, 420 pictures. What are you doing differently that indicates that you can only export one picture?

Export Original gives exactly the same file that you originally imported to Photos. It won't have any edits, crops, or annotations that you may have added in Photos. The suffix will be HEIC if that's what it was when it was imported. If you want, the annotations, like the caption, the keywords, and title, can be exported in a separate "XMP" file that has the same name but a different suffix. Some programs, like Photos, can re-combine them on import.

File>Export>Export nn Photos exports the edited pictures rather than the exact originals. Since it's a different file, you have control over quality and format. It can't be better "quality" than the original, but it might look better if you did clever edits.

If in Photos>Settings>iCloud you have "Download Originals" checked,

then your Mac already has all the full sized images inside the Photos Library. In that case, Export Unmodified Originals is very fast. Exporting edited versions is pretty fast, too.

If you have "Optimize Storage" checked, then the Mac may not have full sized versions of all the pictures on board. So it will have to download the pictures from iCloud. But it may still be a bit faster than using a browser to download the images. I'd use the Photos app.

We haven't talked about why you're exporting the pictures-- that would influence whether you want to export originals or edited versions.

If what you're going for is a backup, then I wonder why you're exporting, at all. A perfectly good backup scheme is to just drag the (fully downloaded with originals) Photos Library to an external hard drive. Then, if something goes wrong with your Library, somehow, you have another.

By the way, in Photos, there are no "edited" versions-- there are only the originals and instructions on how to edit them. When you look at edited pictures, Photos is following those instructions and doing the edits on the fly. So exporting edited pictures and originals takes twice the space. That's an OK thing, if that's what you're going for. (Well, in fact, Photos keeps some edited previews in the Library to speed things up.)

If you were exporting pictures to send to friends or for making a calendar or something, then you'd probably want the edited verslons. But it sounds like you're thinking of an archive of pictures.

I use Time Machine as a backup. Time Machine requires its own volume dedicated to it, but it automatically does an incremenal backup every hour, even if you don't think to. It doesn't take so much space, because it's backing up only things that change. I also copy my Library to a separate backup drive every month or so. I don't ever export all the pictues from the Library.