How do you select multiple photos in iCloud?

The other ongoing problem is the error message I've been getting for months - "Corrupt database - please sign out of Icloud photo library and sign back in". Nothing seems to clear it. I've seen another thread where many pc users are getting that message. Doesn't seem to affect anything, but is annoying.

Willieron wrote:

Actually that's the whole problem, I want to move the photos I take on my phone to my PC and backup to an external drive. Having to use the ALT key to click 1 at a time is extremely tedious and frankly stupid.

If you want your photos on your PC, then you probably don't even want to be using iCloud Photo Library. iCloud Photo Library is a syncing/sharing service designed to sync and share photos among multiple iOS devices and your Mac. So, if you are using iCloud Photo Library simply to provide a staging area to download your photos to your PC, then importing them is far easier, less expensive (if you are using a lot of iCloud space), and faster:

IMPORTING PHOTOS - WINDOWS/MAC

Best,

GB

It's an all or nothing proposition. If you have it turned on, then any photos taken on any device with it turned on will be uploaded. You cannot selectively use it.

You can use Photo Stream to sync photos across your devices, or you can use iCloud Photo Sharing to do that. Up to 1000 Photo Stream photos will remain on your device until you sign out of iCloud or turn Photo Stream off. Once you do that, if you then turn it back on, you will only get the last 30 days re-downloaded from iCloud because that is all that iCloud keeps. But they will remain on your device if you do not do either of those things:

iCloud: My Photo Stream overview

iCloud Photo Sharing - Apple Support

Best,

GB

The posters here want to be able to click on a range of photos (click on the first one and then click on one 50 photos later, and they all get selected). The ALT key on a PC or the Command key on a Mac will allow you to individually select multiple photos.

GB

I try to use my Canon camera most of the time, I'm aware that anything taken on Iphone or Ipad will be automatically uploaded. That's fine, I would just like a more efficient way to select them and download, delete, whatever. And frankly photostream and synching to my Apple TV makes no sense to me at all. I like to use photos for my screensaver when I'm playing music on my Apple TV, no idea how to select which pictures play.

Thanks for the feedback, Larry. However, I would encourage you to consider this from a user experience point of view. I came to this discussion thread using the google search "icloud select multiple photos". This discussion is the first result for that search, so I clicked on it expecting an answer. I suspect many people with this issue will arrive the same way.

Upon arriving at the page, there are 3 answers provided, all of which are tagged "helpful" but none of which provide a solution. They all just say, "it's a bug".

So then I clicked "read all replies" which expands the results from 3 to the first 12 "helpful" answers. Again, none of which have the solution.

After the 12th unhelpful "helpful" answer, I see that there are 34 pages of "answers" in the discussion. Well fine, I'll go to the last page, surely people will have figured it out after 34 pages of discussion. Nope! People are still just saying, "it's broken" on page 34.

So at this point I'm on my own and I try a bunch of things and figure it out. Upon discovering the solution, I thought I'd be a good netizen and share my experience with anyone else who stumbles into this via what I would consider to be an extremely common point of entry (Google).

I'm honestly surprised by two things:

1. That this question hasn't been marked "answered" with one of the answers that you claim exists in the other 32 pages of discussion (I never found it).

2. That you would belittle me for sharing the answer earnestly in the correct location.

Just another day on the Internet I suppose. Have a good one.

Hey folks. Every one is posting the alt solution.

Wake up!! what do you do if you have 8000 photos and you want to secure them on a HD?

iCloud does not want a solution for this. They are by this means the only ones who have a consistent backup of your material. If you think about it.

As soon as you have compressed the photos in your phone to be able to store more. And the phone downloads the fullress as soon as you request it "from iCloud"

I remember trying to backup in the past. You could select all but they would download one by one into your computer. And when something went wrong you had to hunt where it went wrong and start from there. So you would never get a 100% consistent backup from iCloud.

ITS ICLOUDS BUSSINES MODEL TO MAKE IT HARD TO ACCESS!!

This does not work:

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.

Do you have any other suggestions?

APPLE: why can't we select all or multiple photos in a simple and quick way?

It is probably a bug in the new iCloud user interface at www.cloud.com. All buttons in the toolbar are still there to handle selected photos but the "Select" button is now missing. That can simply not be intentional. At least, I hope so.

But the bigger problem anyway is, that selecting multiple photos does not download them properly as an entity in one go, but opens a separate download window for each of them. The more pressing problem is that Apple solves the way how batch downloads are handled. Having to deal with 200 download windows opening n Safari, when 200 photos have been selected to download is not feasible. We need a nice and tidy download option back, that will allow to select a range of photos and downloads them as a folder in on one go. And it should have an option to download the original RAW files, not just the edited versions. Right now, the iCloud interface to Photos is more like a write-only memory, we can upload photos, but it hard to get them back. And not being able to retrieve the original RAW files is a deal breaker for serious photographers. Photos is claiming to preserve a lossless workflow.

It is a tool to browse your photos, if you cannot access your computer and to download a few photos if you cannot get access to your main Photos Library.

It is not even suitable for browsing a large iCloud photo library, because there is no search tool. We have to prepare for the emergency by creating plenty of albums in advance, and putting the photos we may need to access online into separate albums for each purpose. The Photos and All Photos view are just too difficult to browse, if the library is not just a small toy library. Even my moderately sized Photos library of 45000 photos cannot be browsed online by scrolling the Moments or the All Photos.

Thanks for the workaround, I found a slightly faster worksaround and from the results, probably explain why Apple turned off the select all features. Seems like the icloud web is unstable handling any action on large amount of photos. So my lcuky guess is that by turning of the "select all" features, chances of having not responding error are minimized.

To delete Multiple Moments

>Go to Photos

>Add new folder by clicking on + sign on the top right

>Ignore the folder naming.

>Now you can select multiple Moments

>Press Delete button on your keyboard (as we can't find any icon associate with the delete)

>Delete selected Items*

*Notes, do not press delete immediately after you have completed the selection, wait for the page to finish loading, cooldown or whatever you might call it, otherwise you may receieve the "not responding error" and you will need to redo it.

I managed to delete 750photos at one go without error.

Good luck.

OK I found a partial solution for this. Since the "select button" option is gone now. The method that I found at least selects all the files in one album. Suppose you have 200 files (images) in one album it selects all the 200 images and lets us download all of these in one go. Keep the photos in "Photos" mode on the right side bar. Select "Photos" button on the right side bar to appear all the photos in separate albums. Do not select "All photos" button just below it. For this I used chrome. Here's how it works,

1. Select one photo in an album,

2. Once you do that, there appears a "+" and a "square" upload sign on the upper right side of the window. The "+" sign is for creating new folder.

3. Click the "+" sign and then automatically all the photos in that album are selected. From there you can download all with one click.

I stumbled upon this yesterday and figured I would share.

To download all photos and videos using Windows OS:

1) Download and install iCloud Photos on your machine (www.apple.com/icloud/photos/)

2) Open "My Computer" and click on the icon for iCloud Photos

3) In the upper left there are options to Download and Upload photos.

4) Chose the "Download Photos and Videos" and a new dialogue box will open.

5) Simply chose "All Photos" or select an album and click download.

This worked for me using Windows 10. I hope this helps someone!

So above is the original technical question posted for this thread.

It has been acknowledged that the (arguably) best way to do this has been removed from iCloud.com.

A mechanism for telling Apple, the only party with the ability to "fix" this, has been given.

If you want to ask additional answerable technical questions that aren't related to this question, please start a new thread. That's how this community runs.

Is there a way to backup all the images one 'already' took or captured in their personal storage? No.

IMO, you want iCloud to be something it may not be. You may want a different product. With a different feature set.

Apple never clearly defined what iCloud is, and what it has to be.

I believe Apple has clearly defined what iCloud is and you don't like it. So be it. Other posters here have given you their "answer" to this "question". You want it to be something else, and it isn't. Tell Apple.

and I never asked you to provide alternatives, I knew those things. I was talking about serious problem iCloud has right now and you seem having no idea either.

This is the type of debate that is not allowed on this community. No volunteer contributor here can possibly answer your "question" or address your disappointment in Apple. Simply saying "serious problem" can't be considered constructive criticism.

Only Apple can and they want you to contact them here >>> http://www.apple.com/feedback/

I found a solution to grab a group of photos by 'moment' or 'date' without clicking each one individually (See image below). There are a couple of buttons, (plus sign and a square with upward pointing line) which only show up if you mouse over a date range of photos. The buttons are small and positioned at the top right of a series of photos. Click either one of those buttons and it will highlight all photos for that 'date' or 'Moment'. Select from the drop-down OR click in a blank area which will make the drop-down disappear. You can then choose the Download option at the top of the page. It's ridiculous that the normal Shift+Click function doesn't work for selecting a series. I'm using icloud from a PC on 3/2017

This video gets the credit for explaining this process:

https://youtu.be/XIr283WnLLY