How do I download and entire album from iCloud Photos w-out clicking on every img to select it??

I think I found a way to do it. You would have to go to icloud and create the album with all the pics you want to download. Then go to your phone, find the album and you will see the option to "select all", select them and then use "Air Drop" to drop all the pictures at once to your Mac. It might take a while depending on how many pics are but I did it and it worked. Hope this helps.

You may also want to send feedback to Apple and report this usability problem.

The feedback form is here: Apple - iCloud - Feedback

iCloud is not of much use, if we only can store 2 TB of files, but not download them conveniently in large batches.

If you do not want to use iCloud Photo Library on your Mac for your main Photos Library, you could create a second Photos Library on an external drive and use this library to download the photos from iCloud Photo Library to your Mac.

Only one of your libraries can sync with iCloud.

Once the album has synced to this separate Photos Library, you can export the photos and import them to your main library.

This page of the Photos Help explains how to create multiple libraries and switch between libraries: https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/pht6d60b524

The second library on the external drive can double nicely as a backup of the photos you are keeping in iCloud. You need such a backup anyway.

What happens is that each and every img is downloaded and opened by preview, or quicktime if its a video, which for me meant that I had 422 opened img-objects on my screen when download was finished

That may well be the reason why the "Select All" option has been removed - to prevent us from crashing the system by opening too many windows at once.

But making it impossible at all to batch download the items from iCloud is not user friendly. When the Photos.app at www.icloud.com first has been introduced, it would download all photos to a folder and not prompt to open them for each and every photo individually. This changed recently and made batch downloads unfeasible.

Where are the source photos for this album now? Do you not already have them locally? Were they all made with a phone also subscribed to this Apple ID?

Perhaps you don't understand the primary design of iCloud Photo Library. it is a syncing service, designed to keep your library the same between your subscribed devices. it is not an off line storage option where you can "move" your photos to.

If these are your photos and you want them on your Mac, why not enable the photo library on the Mac and let iCloud sync them? Takes the same time with much less clicking on your part.

As an alternative, can i download photos directly from my phone to an external hard drive?

It seems like Apple likes to make things complicated. Even if I use icloud, i still can't easily download my photos.

I would love help with this. I have very precious photos on my iphone that i need to save outside of the cloud.

I need to wipe my phone completely to see if that would take care of an other problem, but I want to take care of these photos first.

Please help!

OK.

Best of luck to you.

Do you have a computer you could sync the photos to using the iCloud Photo Library? Another option would be to use a storage cloud system like Dropbox or Flicker to store the photos.