I download iCloud for Windows PC and am trying to get my pictures but get the message "Your photo and video library is being prepared." but there is no progress bar or any discernible activity. How long does the process take or will it ever go throug

To anyone still trying to get past this issue, I found an excellent piece of 3rd party software that did the job perfectly (like Apple should be doing). The software is called CopyTrans Cloudly. Highly recommended. It's free as well.

I have the exact problem. And have been trying to extract my data from Apple since I applied High Sierra on my Macbook.

I am now using brand new PC running Windows 10 which (needless to say) didn't have any Apple software (i.e., iCloud) installed on it before today. I've been waiting for six-plus hours with no feedback whatsoever, save the polite message that "It may take a while to prepare a large library for the first time. You will be able to download photos and videos once this is complete." I've got a ton of bandwidth to play with and am working on a clean machine... so the problem *must* be on my end right?

Having some time on my hands, I have discovered that I can download my photos one-by-one-by-one (using iCloud from a web browser). Yes, that's as slow as it sounds.

I can say two things for certain:

1) Future me will be much more careful about where my data is put.

2) Apple is broken.

I had this issue starting last fall. After several weeks of seeing “Your library is being prepared…” I gave up assuming it would never work. Got a new laptop in January and reinstalled iCloud and got the same message when trying to download photos (also could not upload photos, the photos just sit there saying “Uploading XX photos”). After a month with no change I called Apple support, they told me my iCloud photo library was corrupt and needed to be recovered which would delete my library. I quickly backed everything up to Google Photos, Apple did the reset on my library and… it still doesn’t work. I randomly lost some photos in my library but not all, nevertheless it’s hard to say what is and isn’t there now so it’s essentially a re-do. So my iCloud photo library still doesn’t work but, Google Photos does. Everything is backed up and now synced with my computer but not with iCloud which is frustrating. Shouldn’t be this way but…

It is still not working on my old Windows 7 machine --- it was working for a while on this machine and then it stopped. It has never worked on my Windows 10 machine. I wonder if the size of the library is the problem. If the library is small then probably no problem, but if it is large then there is a problem. I have now resorted to exporting photos from my Mac Photos app to a thumb drive by years, and then taking the thumb drive and putting the pictures onto my Windows 10 machine.

Apple Please Fix this Problem!

I recently had this issue also and was unable to find any solution for it, I also noticed that my iCloud icon in the system tray seemed to be stuck in upload photos, showing a count of 13. The last time I tried uploading any photos was several months ago, so obviously this was never going to complete.

What worked for me was the following steps:

1. Completely uninstall iCloud for Windows and restart the computer.
2. Download iCloud for Windows from Apple's website.
3. Delete the Camera Roll, Saved Pictures and iCloud Photos folders from my Pictures as these will be recreated and populated later.
4. Install iCloud for Windows using the downloaded installer and follow all the setup instructions using the default settings.
5. Afterwards the iCloud icon showed it was updating and it began recreating all my folders and downloading all of my shared albums, I waited for the update to complete before trying anything else.
6. Finally I opened iCloud Photos and tried clicking the Download button, this time I was presented will a dialog to select All or specific years to download, I clicked All and my entire library was finally download to my computer.

Hope this works for someone else.

This has not worked for me either. Everything had been working fine until around October or November 2017 when I got an update to icloud for windows 7. After this I started getting the message. When I click on the icloud I see that it says updated today at 6:14 AM. When I try to download the pictures I get the message. When I go to the download folder, no pictures are there. I do have a large library of pictures, but I think there is definitely a problem if it can't process the library during a 2 month period! Need Help!!!!

I have the same problem. Since a couple of days I cannot download anything: just get the message "library is being prepared". Re-installing does not help. I won't try to disable/enable iCloud media library (>100 Gb) on all my 3 devices, it would take many hours to reload the pictures again.

The iCloud for Windows doesn't seem to work stable with Win10.

Dear Apple, please provide a patch for that.

Still have the same problem. It worked on old computer with Windows 7, but it does not work with new computer running Windows 10... Apple needs to provide a fix for this as it seems a lot of people with same issue.

Have the exact same problem. I called Apple and they went through the setup with me. They agree there should be a status bar of some kind giving us some kind of idea something is happening. It’s been a week and still getting that message and have no clue how long I have left to wait. The guy from Apple said he keep in touch and hasn’t I replied to the email he gave me twice and he never responded. I’m quite annoyed that they’ve made it ridiculously hard for me to download my photos! Maybe it’s a Microsoft issue not Apple?

Brenza

I had this working on Windows 7, it took about a week to download the photos and then everything worked great. This worked for about a year and then in November 2017, after getting an update from Apple I started having this problem. If it is Apple software problem then they have made an inferior product and need to take ownership of this. If it is a Windows problem, then Apple needs to come clean and say that their software does not work on Windows machines. Instead they advertise that all of this works when it doesn't. This has to be the worst possible situation, put out software and then do not support it and ignore all customer complaints on your own forum! Very frustrated and looking for work around this mess.

I've been watching my resource monitor since January 20th (for reference, this is TWO WEEKS). iCloudPhotos.exe has been the top resource usage for both network and disk during this time. Apple... you seriously need to get it together and stop holding people's data hostage. I am now seriously contemplating doing an in-store "will it blend" demo with my iPhone. Apple, you MUST fix this.

Apple, you MUST FIX THIS.

I have found it works perfectly with my 1st Apple ID but doesn't work with the 2nd. Maybe the reason is that after 1st entrance to Apple ID the 2nd one will be blocked even after full re-installation? Maybe some information in Windows registry should be deleted first?

This "downloading" the library process has been going on for over 24 hours. After reading all of these replies it looks as though Apple needs to fix this problem with Windows 10. I personally never have been a fan of Apple because of things like this but since my entire family is dead set on having iphones, I caved in. Now, all of my daughter's pictures for an entire year of her life are on the cloud. Since we were new iphone users we didn't know to check the box to have them download to the phone and the cloud, she had the "optimize photo storage" checked so she has only low resolution photos on her phone and if we want to free up space in the cloud we have to save each photo individually which is 20 thousand photos!!! I just don't know why Apple makes it so difficult to get YOUR OWN CONTENT off of the cloud. They should have an option to get zip files of all of your content so you can download all of your content at once. I am not sure this "downloading" the library is even working because the storage on my computer is still the same. After speaking with an Apple rep, he told me that the process takes a while because it's literally downloading each photo but if that were true why would my computer storage space not be going down while the process was working? I just don't think it's working and we are in the process of switching from Sprint to AT&T and need to resolve this issue asap.

Come on Apple... is there another way to get all of your photos off of the cloud?

I have the same painful issue. I just want to download my entire library to a PC and it has been running for months. I may have to try another device and transfer to PC another way. Does anyone know if this will work on an android tablet then we can transfer to PC another way? I will then cancel my icloud storage account.

Thank you so much!!!!!