40,000 photos. How do I download them from iCloud?? and more ???s

[kingweb]

I am paying $20/month for my 1TB. storage and my wife's 1TB storage. We each have about 40,000 pictures on iCloud that take up about 350GB on each of our accounts.

2 Questions:

1. How do I download them all from Apple? Anyone know any good software for this. I read several articles telling me to select them and then download. I am not going to select 40,000 pictures to download. There has to be a better way.

2. Apple's maximum plan is 2TB. Theoretically even though I am not there yet, what would I do if I ran out of space?

3. I don't take a lot of pictures. I know 40,000 sounds like a lot, but this is an accumulation of pictures since about 2008. What do you do to preserve your pictures?

I am 43 years old. When I was younger, we used film. You wouldn't snap a picture for every little thing. You didn't have your camera with you 24/7 and sleep next to it. You thought twice about taking a picture, because essentially it cost money, and you might run out of room on your film which only allowed for 24 pictures or 36.

Obviously now, nobody thinks twice about photographing every little thing, as well as taking multiple pictures of the same thing, "just in case".

Forget about printing photos and putting them in an album.

I am also afraid to store them on a hard drive that doesn't have RAID and a built in back up. I have had too many hard drive failures over the years to trust a single hard drive.

Im sure I am not the only one with this issue. So as the years go by, will apple start adding bigger and bigger plans? They basically have us by the balls.

 

[Ledsteplin]

Put them on your computer for sure. As a safety net, upload them to a service like Google Photos. It's free and offers unlimited storage.

 

[knotsure]

I don't have 40,000 pics, yet, but I have pushed past 13,000. I have over 115 Gb of pics and vids on my iPhone right now and want to back them up somewhere else besides the icloud. Unfortunately I have the 256gb MacBook retina and do not have the open storage to download my pics and put them on a hard drive. So I don't know what to do yet.

So I am watching this post closely.

 

[kingweb]

The problem is even if you back them up to your computer, it ties up a good chunk of your hard drive. Also what happens if the hard drive crashes? Years of photos lost?

Google degrades image quality over 16mb from what I recall. Before I used iCloud, I tried google images (or whatever they call it). It was horrible. It wouldn't always back up all my photos. Often it backed up the same photo multiple times. It was hard to sort/filter. I don't know if it has changed at all, but when it first started, it was awful. I moved to iCloud, because Apple usually gets things right and user friendly. But there is also a usually a premium price to pay with apple.

 

[Not Quite Right]

Here's a couple of tip's:
#1 quit being lazy. There's no-way you have 40,000 individual pack-around a lifetime worthy photos. Time to 86 all of the blurry black shots of your thumb, screenshots of your Words with Friends triple word scores, and the 30 duplicate photos of the exact same shot of your dog staring at your Taco Bell Loco Taco. I bet you would gain half of your storage space back in one felt swoop...
#2 For the rest of the "Keepers" get one of these or something similar https://forums.imore.com/e?link=htt...ge%2Fmy-cloud-mirror-gen2.html&token=eFxNHqMI

 

[kingweb]

I totally agree about deleting the blurry and the useless pics. However how do I download even 20,000 pics?

 

[steveh552]

I personally use Google Photos and have found it to be very reliable. I had issues uploading videos from my iPhone but photos uploaded great as long as the app was open. I just did over 1500 photos in Las Vegas and kept the app running just in case I would lose my phone I would not lose my photos and it worked flawlessly. I also have photos uploaded to Flicker and on private albums so that only I can see them.

 

[kingweb]

Well, I look at the WD backup drive, however, per their own website, their backup app is crap. It has to be open and the iPhone cannot be locked. Meaning the screen has to be on for it to backup the photos. Absolutely ridiculous and useless.

There are still a few things that are very unclear to me with iCloud photos. On a Mac, if I set the photos app to "optimize", it still downloads all the thousands of photos taken with my iPhone. Maybe in a smaller size, but it still downloads them, and they take a lot of space too. At least, that's the way it seems, because when I check my used storage, it is showing me about 100GB worth of photos and another 50gb worth of videos. This seems pretty high for "optimizing".

I would much rather have it so that ALL my photos are stored in the iCloud, and whenever I want to view them, it pulls them on the fly from iCloud, but does NOT store it on my phone or computer, regardless of the size. Maybe just store the most recent X number of days. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

Then in the photos app for months, it always shows "uploading x of y photos to iCloud". Seems like it never ends. Furthermore, I don't know what there is to upload. All my photos came from my iPhone. So the Mac should maybe download, but it wouldn't have anything to upload. And why does it never end. I really think they intentionally are keeping all this stuff confusing and hard to use just to force us never to cancel. They really have people by the balls.

As for google images, I tried it a while back when it first came out, but it seemed like a total train wreck. I was getting tons of duplicates, and it was completely unorganized. I'm sure maybe they made it better by now, but I am also concerned about the image quality. I think they degrade images and video. But that still might be the best bet. Does it automatically backup even if the phone screen is locked?

 

[Ledsteplin]

Well, I look at the WD backup drive, however, per their own website, their backup app is crap. It has to be open and the iPhone cannot be locked. Meaning the screen has to be on for it to backup the photos. Absolutely ridiculous and useless.

There are still a few things that are very unclear to me with iCloud photos. On a Mac, if I set the photos app to "optimize", it still downloads all the thousands of photos taken with my iPhone. Maybe in a smaller size, but it still downloads them, and they take a lot of space too. At least, that's the way it seems, because when I check my used storage, it is showing me about 100GB worth of photos and another 50gb worth of videos. This seems pretty high for "optimizing".

I would much rather have it so that ALL my photos are stored in the iCloud, and whenever I want to view them, it pulls them on the fly from iCloud, but does NOT store it on my phone or computer, regardless of the size. Maybe just store the most recent X number of days. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

Then in the photos app for months, it always shows "uploading x of y photos to iCloud". Seems like it never ends. Furthermore, I don't know what there is to upload. All my photos came from my iPhone. So the Mac should maybe download, but it wouldn't have anything to upload. And why does it never end. I really think they intentionally are keeping all this stuff confusing and hard to use just to force us never to cancel. They really have people by the balls.

As for google images, I tried it a while back when it first came out, but it seemed like a total train wreck. I was getting tons of duplicates, and it was completely unorganized. I'm sure maybe they made it better by now, but I am also concerned about the image quality. I think they degrade images and video. But that still might be the best bet. Does it automatically backup even if the phone screen is locked?

Did you set to optimize photos on your iPhone?

 

[tr1ad]

I always get the message to leave my phone on for faster backup with GPhotos, but I don't and they still upload.

Haven't had any issues with duplicates or quality... Hi res offers limited storage, but their optimisation is still good quality..(used it to print photo books off shutrerfly)

 

[brian_84]

$20 a month for iCloud, yikes. They don't offer larger accounts because who needs 2TB a month?! Here's what I would do: Get them off iCloud, thin them out so you know where everything is, then save and back them up locally. Surely no one needs 40,000 photos available to them at all times.

 

[kimmh72]

Yep I have a regular clean out of my 8000+ photos and use and app to remove duplicates. Then I take photos off the phone I don't really need to carry with me from years ago and back them up onto a HDD. The remained of photos stay in my cloud