How to select all photos in iCloud

Hi, I'm trying to select all the photos in a album on icloud.com so I can download the photos but I dotn want to select each photo individually because theres 600 odd of them is there anyway todo this in bulk.

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null-OTHER, Windows 10, laptop

Posted on Oct 23, 2017 12:25 PM

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Posted on Jun 29, 2018 5:52 AM

I solved it accidentally: ( I could not find the Select All button and cntrl+A and/or pressing shift button did not work)
on top left of the icould/photos , under the "iCloud Photos" you see a sidebar. the first top item is Photos, then Albums, then All Photos, Videos, ....
I made the mistake to go to All Photos, while you should go to Photos (the first item on the sidebar). when you click on it, you can see all your photos categorized by time and place tag. in front of each headline (including time and place) move your cursor to the rightmost place, two items appear: " + " (for adding to album) and "sharing item". press sharing item (which is an upward arrow coming out of a box), and all the photos in the category get selected/highlighted. now do not click on any of the pop-ed up items. but just go to top of the page right and next to your account name and the deleting button, you find the Download button (a downward arrow coming out of a cloud) press it and you can download all the photos in the category.
you can repeat this for all categories you want.

it is not like you can download all photos altogether, but I think it is better than downloading each one-by-one.

144 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 29, 2018 5:52 AM in response to raseys

I solved it accidentally: ( I could not find the Select All button and cntrl+A and/or pressing shift button did not work)
on top left of the icould/photos , under the "iCloud Photos" you see a sidebar. the first top item is Photos, then Albums, then All Photos, Videos, ....
I made the mistake to go to All Photos, while you should go to Photos (the first item on the sidebar). when you click on it, you can see all your photos categorized by time and place tag. in front of each headline (including time and place) move your cursor to the rightmost place, two items appear: " + " (for adding to album) and "sharing item". press sharing item (which is an upward arrow coming out of a box), and all the photos in the category get selected/highlighted. now do not click on any of the pop-ed up items. but just go to top of the page right and next to your account name and the deleting button, you find the Download button (a downward arrow coming out of a cloud) press it and you can download all the photos in the category.
you can repeat this for all categories you want.

it is not like you can download all photos altogether, but I think it is better than downloading each one-by-one.

Mar 12, 2018 2:56 AM in response to raseys

Shift and select no longer works in iCloud. But it still does in Photos, which is where your device will also be stashing the pics, so if you are trying to download them to a Mac then open Photos, click on All Photos and then you can download the originals from there by selecting all in the normal way. I've just tried it and it worked. It is obviously a deranged way to have to do things, but there's the workaround.

Oct 27, 2018 9:59 AM in response to raseys

THIS ACTUALLY WORKS! It's a lot of steps and obviously apple is trying to keep you from doing this so you'll buy more space.

First you must download the iCloud for Windows or Mac app. Once you install it (and restart your computer) you open the app and click on options next to the photos. Under download to your pc, change the destination to an external harddrive if you have a lot of photos.

Now follow all this:

https://www.copytrans.net/support/how-to-transfer-your-photos-from-icloud-to-you r-pc/#icloudforwindows

May 22, 2018 1:08 AM in response to raseys

macos - Downloading all photos from iCloud Photo Library without Photos app - Ask Different


Check out this link. If you're computer savvy and are down to mess around in Chrome or Safari's inspector tool, here's a wonderful workaround that doesn't require clicking 1000+ photos consecutively.


PS: Thanks Apple for deliberately ignoring major user pain points and making us have to dig into a DEV TOOL to extract our photos all because of a poor and ill-intended UX decision to NOT make a "Select All" button :-)

Aug 9, 2018 1:30 PM in response to raseys

Took me a while to figure out the most effective way to get all of your photos / videos onto your windows box.

The following is a link with details and some of my notes.


If you go to this link you:

http://osxdaily.com/2016/05/26/download-photos-from-icloud/


Search in the page for this:

How to Download All iCloud Photos to Windows PC


follow the instructions.


Some notes.....

You will have to install the iCloud for windows desktop app.

Opening the iCloud app you can specify windows directory locations.


On window search bar: iCloud Photos and click

Download photos and videos on tool bar.

All


.... will put in directory you specified in the iCloud app.

I had over 1600 pictures so it took a while to download all of them.

Mar 12, 2018 2:13 PM in response to raseys

Well, turns out there is a way. It's quite a **** of a work around, but it WILL get your photos onto your device all at once, and the only way Apple can stop it is to reverse engineer some of their platforms (mind you, they probably will once enough people do this as it is OBVIOUS they are making it this hard on purpose) But here's the link. Enjoy.


How to get Apple photos out of iCloud - YouTube

Mar 24, 2018 6:21 AM in response to raseys

I have found somewhat of a shortcut, as you can select all the photos of one moment in one click:


  • Open iCloud photos in your browser
  • Select the folder photo's (not the 'All photo's' listed under Albums);
  • To the right of the date there is a plus. Click it, it now selects all the photos made on this date, click besides the pop-up;
  • The photo's should still me selected, so now you can delete/download them all at once.


I hope this helped a little

Jul 9, 2018 6:09 PM in response to raseys

This worked on my online iCloud account viewing Photos sorted by location and date: see the 3 steps below photo.

User uploaded file

1. Hover your mouse in the area across from the location-date info for the photos you want to download, and then click on the plus sign that should appear.

2. Clicking on the plus icon ➕ selects all the files associated with location/date and presents a pop-up menu for adding photos to an album.

3. If you then mouse click in any white space area around a photo, the pop-up menu will go away, the photos remain selected, and the icloud download icon becomes active.

To the right of the plus icon ➕ is a Share icon. Selecting the Share icon also selects all the photos for a location/date. However, when I attempted this icon the icloud download button wouldn't activate. I had to log out then back in to my iclould account to reset whatever I had confused. I used the plus icon for downloads successfully. Hope this helps others out there frustrated with this problem.

My set-up: Mac Mini (2014) with Bootcamped Windows 7 ; Firefox v61 64bit

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How to select all photos in iCloud

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