“Download Originals to this Mac” in Photos for Mac doesn’t use full bandwidth/download speed.

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Level 1

9 points

“Download Originals to this Mac” in Photos for Mac doesn’t use full bandwidth/download speed.

Hello, I am trying to download 1.5 TB of photos and videos from iCloud Photo Library to my Mac mini (M1). I turned on the “Download Originals to this Mac” option and it does seem to download all the original contents… But it’s quite slow. I’ve turned it on for a full day and it only downloaded 30 GB.

So I open the activity monitor and found that the Photos app is using significantly less bandwidth (500 KB/s) than my internet download speed (500 MB/s). However, when I click on a video, the Photos app download it to view it with the full bandwidth. I could confirm this on activity monitor with a spike in data received (goes up to around 10 MB/s).

It’s Mac mini so it shouldn’t have any battery constraint either. I can’t download it directly from iCloud.com or “Get a copy of your data” in privacy.apple.com because it discards any albums or Apple Photos specific metadata.

Is there any way to make the Photos app use the full download speed for automatic “Download Originals to this Mac”?

Thank you so much!

Mac mini, macOS 11.2

Posted on Apr 29, 2021 9:39 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

TonyCollinet

Level 7

23,867 points

Apr 30, 2021 1:35 AM in response to kihaahn

Good tip - This might work if you want to force a download for multiple images. Select them all in thumbnail view, CMD-E to auto enhance (I guess this will force a download, so may take a while), then with them all still selected image>revert to original. I guess CMD-R will also work instead of CMD-E

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Answer 2

kihaahn Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 30, 2021 1:47 AM in response to TonyCollinet

Thank you!

This is another option I found: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250850693

It exports the photos and dumps it in some external hard drive and we can reformat them later.

I am not sure which one is faster. Perhaps auto enhancing it uses too many computation power for 1.5 TB worth of photos and videos?

With this, I have been able to download already 1GB!

Thank you :)

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Answer 3

Apr 30, 2021 12:40 AM in response to kihaahn

Hi

Sadly this is an "it is what it is" situation.

Syncing large libraries takes a long time, and doesn't use your full internet bandwidth. For comparison, when I did my 50GB 5000 image library it took a full 48 hours, so your 30GB in a day is not bad.

I don't know what is the limiting factor on speed. Though I suspect it is Apple's servers (can you imagine load on them from every iphone user in the world continuously taking pictures - and then all the mac users loading in their DSLR raw files - and this doesn't even include all the people like you, newly syncing a whole library. The server load must be enormous)

Bottom line is - you just need to be patient and hope your 30GB/day keeps up. Leave the mac on 24/7 with photos open.

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Answer 4

kihaahn Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 30, 2021 1:21 AM in response to TonyCollinet

Thank you so much!

Yeah... I was just wondering if there was some hidden ways because when I download it manually, it's much much faster... Maybe the server is reserving its speedy connection for those manual request and leaving the slower one for day-to-day syncing? Or perhaps the Photos app algorithm is trying to do all this in background and not slow other applications with wifi down...?

I guess I have to wait around 50 days... 😅

Thank you anyways :)

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Answer 5

kihaahn Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 30, 2021 1:30 AM in response to kihaahn

I just found a little trick...

If I click command-R (rotate), then the Photos app must download it to edit the change (it doesn't have to be rotate, it just has to be any edit).

After that, I can just "revert to original" and the whole action basically becomes "force download."

Perhaps there's more elegant trick similar to this?

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“Download Originals to this Mac” in Photos for Mac doesn’t use full bandwidth/download speed.

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