Transfer Photos from iCloud to my External Drive with original date and location

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Level 1

8 points

Transfer Photos from iCloud to my External Drive with original date and location

PLEASE HELP!!!

I have never made much effort to manage my photos. After realizing I have no more iCloud space, I decided to manage my photos since they take over 60% of my iCloud space. I have 18,000 files and significant concerns in loosing any of the files or the info for each photo.

I have a Mac Air currently running Mojave. When I open the Mac Photo Application I can tell the content of the Mac is much less than that of my iCloud.com storage. Online article suggested I "Download" within the webpage using Safari to my external hard drive. The browser won't let me do more than 1k files at a time. after 9k files I realize that the files now all have the same date and no location info.

How do I get my photos out of iCloud with all the Original info??

Posted on Jan 12, 2020 9:33 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

tygb

Level 9

64,742 points

Jan 14, 2020 4:34 PM in response to LinaJAC

Photos can’t be transferred directly from iCloud to an external hard drive for that you need to set up iCloud photo library see the article https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT204264

And its preferences https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/photos/pht5156cc968/4.0/mac/10.14 , open finder > Go > home > your user name > pictures either drag and drop Photos Library.photoslibrary to an external hard drive , the second method is right click on Photos Library.photoslibrary and click on show package contents in the upcoming column , you can also drag and drop complete masters folder to an external hard drive that is connected .

Also as per the article https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/photos/pht6d60d10f/mac

Manually copy your library to an external storage device: Drag the Photos library (by default in the Pictures folder on your Mac) to your storage device to create a copy.
See this articles also Photos library - Move your Library to an external storage device

https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT209454

In photos application do the settings as per screen shot .

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Answer 2

LinaJAC Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 14, 2020 2:01 PM in response to LinaJAC

Update:

I was able to create a photo library in my external HD with all the original dates and geo tags.

Now, I want to make the old photos (before 2018) go away from my iCloud and apple devices, and only keep the originals on my external hard drive.

How can I do this? I have a Mac Air running Mojave and an iPhone 5 SE in need of update. My husband won't help me because he says he is a PC guy and hates apple's way of doing things.

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