Unable to back up photos to external hard drive

Question

Level 1

12 points

Unable to back up photos to external hard drive

Hi,

I am trying to back up my photos to an external hard drive. I can not find my 4000ish photos in computer as they are stored on icloud. it only shows 86 photos which are old photos which i have previously saved. My phone (iphone 6 64gb) says i have 18 gb of space used by my photos.

My laptop is windows Vista so therefore can not download icloud for windows.

I intended to link my Iphone to my laptop using the usb cable, opening up the file and simply transferring to the external hard drive which i have done before prior to using icloud, but have encountered the above issues.

Is there an easy solution to help de clutter my phone and back up the photos.

All help is greatly appreciated

iPhone 6, iOS 10.0.2

Posted on Oct 12, 2016 2:26 PM

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Answer 1

zinacef

Level 10

88,828 points

Oct 12, 2016 3:36 PM in response to red231

If the photos are already stored in iCloud, why is there a need to transfer them to your iPhone? If they're stored in iCloud, they will also be stored on your iPhone providing iCloud Photo Library was turned on.

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Answer 2

red231 Author

Level 1

12 points

Oct 13, 2016 2:35 AM in response to zinacef

Thanks for the reply, i think we may have caused some confusion with exactly what we are after. We are not trying to get the photos from icloud onto the iphone.

The iphone shows that we have some 4000 photos on the phone however when we link the iphone to our laptop via the usb cable it only gives us access to 86 old photos. i am assuming the rest are stored in icloud. i am coming to the limit of the phones capacity so therefore need to de clutter the phone. we also wish to back our photos up somewhere else.

How do we transfer these photos in icloud to an external hard drive. we can not get access to icloud for windows as we are using windows vista.

is there an easy way to transfer photos stored in icloud to an external hard drive.

Thanks

Reply

Answer 3

zinacef

Level 10

88,828 points

Oct 13, 2016 5:29 AM in response to red231

If you had 4000 photos on the iphone, then it should also have 4000 in icloud because that's the purpose of icloud -- to sync all of your photos across all devices.

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