How to share iCloud photos with users who don't own an Apple Device

That's a clever idea, thanks for responding -- it might help someone else who reads this thread in the future. I'm no longer at my brother's house, so I don't have access to any of his Apple devices and thus can't try your idea. (I think it's quite possible that a guest user on an iCloud account has *no* authority to adjust settings on that account nor to set up an iCloud account for any other AppleId... but it's definitely worth a try!)

I did finally find a workaround -- painful enough that I won't recommend it to anyone else -- which involved:

1. setting up my brother as a guest in one of my OneDrive accounts (I chose a "business" account; but the workaround *might* work for a personal OneDrive as well);
2. mounting this OneDrive for Business on my brother's PC (by revealing my admin password to that device, because I was too much of a cheapskate to spend another $8/month on OneDrive for Business licensing fees, to make him a fully-provisioned "employee" in my business)
3. one-by-one selecting photos (by tickbox) for download from my brother's iCloud Photo (on his PC) into his mount of my OneDrive for Business. It's possible to click on multiple files for a small-bulk download via iCloud Photo; but I found out the hard way that it's a big mistake to click on too many -- perhaps there's a buffer overflow somewhere in this mount of OneDrive for Business into iCloud Photo? Anyway ... I was able to download up to 12 photos at a time; but a couple of attempts at downloading approx 40 photos failed without any error message.

I have no idea whether this trick would work if you use the OneDrive app for Mac!

There are a lot of moving parts in this trick, so it may not work in the future:

1. Microsoft is still actively revving its OneDrive for Business codebase (which is a client for a SharePoint server);
2. Microsoft is still actively revving its OneDrive codebase.
3. OneDrive for Mac seemed to be (at a glance) somewhat crippled in its support for "OneDrive for Business" (providing AFAIK only a webservice through a browser rather than a full-featured filemount as on a Windows box)
4. I have *no idea* of the current featureset of OneDrive for Mac when it is stacked with (Microsoft's personal) OneDrive service.

And... as with *any* mount of a remote filesystem, there are sync delays which may take hours (or months!) or seconds to resolve -- depending on the size of the directories to be synced, on how many files are being fully downloaded, on network bandwidth, on server load, and on the performance of the local filesystem. (My brother's PC was bottlenecked on its disk for maybe an hour, when syncing to a OneDrive directory that had a few GB of photos and movies; and he gets roughly 8MB/s of symmetric bandwidth from his ISP.)

[Edited by Moderator]

Update: this query is related to Can non-Apple users truly share a Photo a… - Apple Community, and also to a very-stale StackExchange query (in its AskDifferent stream for "your Apple questions") entitled "How to share photos with iOS users if you don't own any Apple products". I'm not providing the URL for the StackExchange query because I have formed the impression that Apple has very strict editorial limits on off-brand URLs in its Community posts... and anyway an internet search would quickly reveal the StackExchange query.

There's an answer to the StackExchange query which has garnered two upvotes (over the past 8 years!) and is essentially the same as the Limnos' second answer (on 4 Dec 2024). I can't test it but am reposting it here just in case it helps someone else.

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Let your friends sign you up for a free iCloud account using their device.

Once you have a username/password in iCloud, you can upload photos and share things quite well using the web app.

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No, that doesn't work for me. It might have worked for other people, in the past -- but I have attached screenshots to my question to indicate the ways in which it fails to work for me.

At Set up iCloud for Windows on your PC - Apple Support, I find a precondition for installing a usable iCloud for Windows on my PC: "Note: Before you can use iCloud for Windows, you must set up iCloud on an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac. See Set up iCloud on all your devices in the iCloud User Guide." Apparently: it's necessary for me to own a recent-issue Apple device in order to set up a fully-functional iCloud which (subsequently) I could use to access the photos my sibling are sharing with all their Apple-powered kindred. Having an AppleID is another necessary step -- but it's not sufficient.

BTW I can't figure out what webpage you had intended to link as "PC using Windows 7 or later and iCloud for Windows (or iCloud Control Panel 3.1 or later", but if you provide the URL I would be able to read it to see if provides me with a feasible method which *doesn't* involve me purchasing a recent Apple device.