How do you select multiple photos in iCloud?

Hello Tiggertiffany,

Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.

If you need to select multiple items on iCloud.com then you can use the common procedure to select multiple items by either holding Command or Shift on your keyboard.

To select multiple files or folders, hold down the Command (⌘) key, then click the items.

To select multiple files or folders that are listed together, click the first item you want to select, hold down the Shift key, then click the last item.

OS X Yosemite: select files or folders

Have a great weekend,

Alex H.

When using Chrome I held the control button and selected multiple pictures then selected the download button, Chrome then asked to allow multiple downloads, I selected "Allow" and then it downloaded each pictures, not as a zip.

Pyronious wrote:

Holding down ALT on my windows PC (using the Chrome browser) allows me to select multiple photos in iCloud. Extremly unusual key combination, but it does work. Weird.

and posted many. many times in this and other threads

LN

Seriously annoying! I get an alert saying my iCloud storage is almost full, and the only way to clear it up is to manually select each item and delete it.

Don't you have any Apple device where you could use iCloud Photo Library to manage the photos in iCloud more conveniently? An iPad, iPhone, Mac? In Photos on an iPhone or iPad you can swipe across many photos at once to select them and trash them. In Photos on a Mac you can select a range with the shift key.

On a PC I have found that you can select Photos on the upper left side. This will separate your photos by date. If you hover your mouse in the right top corner of a group of photos for a specific date a plus sign and the little square with the up arrow in it pops up. Click on the square with the arrow. It then highlights all of the photos for that date. To download the, to my computer, I double click on the download icon (cloud with a down arrow) at the top right of the page next to your name. To delete them all click the little garbage pail.

I was also frustrated because the shift key wasn’t working to select a group of photos one at a time. Since there is no command key on the PC, I tried the alt key and that worked to highlight more than 1 at a time. It still doesn’t work to highlight the first and last photo in a group. Hope this helps.

francoisgs wrote:

sorry but in icloud holding shift does not work!!

It used to work two years ago, when this discussion started, but then unfortunately an update to iCloud.com broke this feature.

We are still waiting for a fix. For the time being use iCloud Photo Library on a Mac to download large amounts of photos from iCloud, or iCloud for windows on a PC with windows (Download iCloud for Windows - Apple Support).

Seriously annoying! I get an alert saying my iCloud storage is almost full, and the only way to clear it up is to manually select each item and delete it.

You can use the CMD button to select multiple, but if you accidentally miss a photo then it unselects all of them... The Shift Key should work.

ynarsing wrote:

Do shift+crtl+alt keys and select the pics you want to download by mouse clicking them (not using arrow keys).

As has been reported multiple times in this 31 page thread, for Windows, simply holding down the Alt key will do the job.

GB

use the "photo" application on mac can select all iCloud photos by Command + A and then can export them in the File | Export or delete them. work like a charm!

Holding down ALT on my windows PC (using the Chrome browser) allows me to select multiple photos in iCloud. Extremly unusual key combination, but it does work. Weird.

Took me a little while to figure this out through brute force of clicking on every option available. Since I pulled up your question while searching for a solution, and noticed that quite a few people had chimed in on your thread for a solution, I figured that I would reply to you in hopes that it would eventually reach the masses. Yes, it is possible to download all of your photos from iCloud using the App (I tried to find a way to do this via the iCloud website, and couldn't figure out a way) on a Mac/PC, but you will need to do a few things on your PC before going through the steps that I'll outline below (Sorry Mac Users, the process is similar, but I really don't want to pull out my MBP 101 to write up a how to). Install, configure and login to the iCloud app in Windows, and note where the "Downloads" folder is located on your PC so that you can navigate there later to manage the photos & videos after they are on your local hard drive. I suggest connecting your computer directly to your router via an Ethernet Cable to prevent any transmission errors that may be encountered when using WiFi to download your iCloud photos and videos. Now on to the steps:

1. Locate the System Tray located in the lower right corner of your display. If the iCloud icon isn't displayed, click the up arrow to expand the System Tray.
   
2. Click on the iCloud System Tray Icon to access the iCloud dialog box which will give you options to control the iCloud app and items associated with your account. Here you will find a section for iCloud Photos with a button to "Download Photos" that you need to click to download your photos.
   
3. The "Download Photos and Videos" dialog box should pop up. Click the appropriate Check Box next to specific years you would like to download. More than likely you are looking for the "All" entry to download all photos and videos.
   
4. Depending upon how many photos and or videos that are stored in your iCloud account, you may experience a long wait while downloading your items. The only download progress indicator that I could find was in the iCloud Dialog Box mentioned in Step 2 where it says "Downloading x,xxx Items".

Hope this helps! ^_____^

See LACAllen's work-around in this discussion: Re: iCloud - Can't select mass photos

You can use the Share menu to select all photos in a moment.

Use the SHARE icon to select the entire moment. then click away to remove the SHARE feature, but the entire moment stays selected

Then use the Download button.

This is a really old thread but there are a lot of replies and it's still a big problem. I think I may have found a sort of simple workaround. I am trying to easily move a very large number of photos to Google Drive on a PC from iCloud. I made the mistake of having 21,000 photos on iCloud, and bought a Macbook pro with a hard drive too small to download them all. The easiest way to do this would have been to open iCloud.com on my PC, select all and drag to my hard drive - but like, everyone else, I can't hold shift to select multiple photos. Instead, it suggests that I should download Windows for iCloud. When I did this, the library was too big for it to try to download with the Photos app and after 3 days of waiting for some sign that something was happening, I got fed up. Here's how I selected more than one photo, but you have to have access to a Mac to do it, and sign into your iCloud:

1. Open your iCloud Drive folder and create a new folder in there for photos.

2. Open iPhoto on a mac. Choose the All Photos album. Select all (Command+A).

3. Go to File>Export and choose the photos folder in your iCloud Drive. Export all of them.

4. You can now watch the status wheel turning. This process took a loooooong time.

5. Go to iCloud.com, go to Drive, and go to the photos folder. You can select all by holding Shift and clicking the first and last photo (but not select all). The download button will now be available.

6. iCloud for Windows actually started updating for iCloud Drive as well when I did this, so it sort of solved both problems.

This little thing is one of the reasons I am leaving for PC after over 25 years as a loyal Apple user. The only reason to make this functionality available in the Drive window and not the Photos window of iCloud.com is to keep people from cancelling their subscription to iCloud storage. It essentially holds your photos hostage, especially if you have a lot of them. Ridiculous.

Can’t select multiple photos and videos in iCloud photos

solution: sign into iCloud on browser < go to “Photos” < in the sidebar click “Photos” to get into “Moments” < under each date and place section click the “+” sign in the upper right corner of the section and only the pics in the date and time section will be highlighted … this is the best way so far of clearing up iCloud memory.

Since that recommendation was made over 3 years ago, and this is a 34 page post, it would have been better if you looked at the last page of responses, where the solution has been repeated numerous times.

For a Mac, hold down the Command key and select the photos you want to download by clicking them. As long as the Command key is held down, all of the photos that you click on will remain selected.

For a PC, use the ALT key to achieve this same result.

GB