How to save iCloud shared album photos to hard drive?

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Level 1

1 points

How to save iCloud shared album photos to hard drive?

My family recently took a vacation to Hawaii, where we each took a ton of photos using our own various devices. One of us decided the best way to share all our photos would be to create a shared photo library in iCloud. We had no problem creating the shared album and uploading our photos to it. However, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to save all the photos from the album to my hard drive. If I select all the photos in the Photos app, then go to Export in the file menu, all the options are greyed out. I tried selecting and dragging all the photos into a finder window, which shows the green plus sign like I'm copying the files over, but the files never make it into the folder itself. Is it possible to download files from a shared iCloud album? Is there an option that the creator of the album can choose to allow others to download the photos? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Posted on Jun 22, 2015 12:30 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 22, 2015 12:37 PM in response to Kevoguy

Try selecting the photos then ctrl-click and choosing import from the contextual menu.

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Answer 2

Kevoguy Author

Level 1

1 points

Jun 22, 2015 12:42 PM in response to Winston Churchill

Import is not an option when I ctrl-click. The options are "Get Info", "Show in Library" (Greyed Out), and "Delete from Shared Album".

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Answer 3

Kevoguy Author

Level 1

1 points

Jun 22, 2015 12:56 PM in response to Kevoguy

Apparently somewhere along the line I did import the photos from the shared folder to my own library. But since all the photos from my family members were taken at the same time and place as my own photos, they're all mixed together, making it impossible to easily select the ones I want to save to a specific folder. So I'm going to have to painstakingly sort through hundreds of photos, selecting only the ones I didn't take, in order to move them to a separate folder, since for some reason the Photos app doesn't let you just drag the files from the shared folder to a finder folder. It forces you to dump it into your own library first.

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Answer 4

Jun 22, 2015 1:05 PM in response to Kevoguy

If it says 'show in library' instead of 'import', that indicates that it has already been imported. Why show in library is greyed, I'm not sure, do you have any other issues with your library.

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