All my photos are stored in iCloud, how to backup photos in iCloud to an external hard drive? It seems it requires me to download the original to either my iphone or my macbook and then export to the hard drive. But I don't have enough space on both.

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Level 1

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All my photos are stored in iCloud, how to backup photos in iCloud to an external hard drive? It seems it requires me to download the original to either my iphone or my macbook and then export to the hard drive. But I don't have enough space on both.

I don't have enough space on both my iPhone and my MacBook laptop. That's why I choose to store all the photos on my iPhone in iCloud automatically. But I want to back up those photos to an external hard drive. Is there a way to download all photos in my iCloud directly to my external hard drive without the need to download them to my computer storage or my iPhone storage first?!

When I connect my iPhone through "Image Capture" to my MacBook, the image captures don't show any pictures because I guess I stored all the pictures on iCloud and didn't download the original size to my iPhone. (I don't have enough storage). The same applies to the "Photos" app on my MacBook. Nothing there and I can't select download original from iCloud because I don't have enough space. And there is no "Select All" button on the iCloud.com web page. So how to download a copy of my iCloud pictures to my external hard drive?

Thanks!!

Posted on Jul 18, 2021 4:19 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

muguy

Level 9

76,267 points

Jul 18, 2021 4:30 PM in response to abonniestar

Without a device capable of storing the originals, there is no practical way to do what you want. I say practical because you could download individual files, or up to 1,000 (on your iPhone) to export (as per https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209454).

It might be a good idea to see what you have on your MacBook and see if you can free enough space to download all your original images for backup.

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All my photos are stored in iCloud, how to backup photos in iCloud to an external hard drive? It seems it requires me to download the original to either my iphone or my macbook and then export to the hard drive. But I don't have enough space on both.

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