Full icloud photos download on Win11 Pro with the iCloud CP or iCloud.com

Hello,

I am in an unusual situation. I have both an iPad Pro and an iPhone 13 Pro Max. I only have a PayPal account to use in my entire life and I am having problems with using it to make purchases because it keeps trying to verify the account even though it is already verified and successfully processes my automatic payment for my iPad extended warranty. I already tried talking to Apple support and they are sending me to talk to PayPal which I will do. In the meantime I am out of room on my iCloud account and cannot increase my storage because I cannot get the payment to process.

That being said, I have room on my Win11 Pro computer to do a full iCloud photos dump and clear out the photos to empty it as a fast work around to solve the problem. I have the iCloud Control Panel (app) (CP) installed on my Win11 Pro desktop but the My Pictures library is located on my NAS drive/server in my apartment and when I tried to enable the photos portion of the CP it gave me the error: "Unable to create a directory for iCloud Photos. Restarting your computer might resolve the issue. (Error 15) and I have restarted the computer but it still gives me the same error.

I am providing screenshots of both the photos settings for the CP and the error message. In the settings screenshot it shows the mapping to the "M:" drive which is located on my NAS/Server. First question is could the fact that it is located on my NAS be the problem? Second question is this, is there any way in the iCloud CP photos settings to redirect where it will download the photos to in order to download it directly to my desktop computer instead of my NAS drive/server to test if the problem is indeed the NAS without having to relocate the entire "My Pictures" library?

Here's the screenshots:

Apple support told me I have to use the iCloud CP to do the download. Is there any alternative method to download my entire photos library from a browser which will give me the ability to pick the location to DL it all to? I signed into my iCloud and went to my photos on my Win11 Pro browser and I cannot find how to select the entire library and then DL it all because there are no selection options and the DL icon is greyed out because nothing is selected. Is it as simple as doing a Ctrl A and it will select everything in the library then then allow me to DL it all?

Thank you.