I, my wife, and other family members have 400GB, 1TB, and 400GB photos, respectively, plus some files stored in a family shared 2T iCloud storage. We've been using the 2T plan for many years, and we're satisfied with and get used to iCloud storage, which makes photos and files accessible anytime and on all Apple devices. Because of iCloud, we usually buy iPhones or iPads with a minimum storage (like 64GB iPhone 11) and only keep optimized small versions of photos on the devices.

But recently:

1. I find the joys of using Chromebook/Android/Linux/Windows, which makes me wonder if there is a more general storage plan.

2. As you see, 2T iCloud storage is near full; we don't want to pay more. We found that although we can access photos conveniently on every Apple device, we seldom access them on every device. All the original photos are just lying on iCloud and all the optimized versions on each device.

3. 99%+ of our iCloud storage is photos; I found the free 5G storage is enough for us to sync important files that need to be on the cloud.

4. We have had a 1T Samsung T7 SSD, a 5T Western Digit Passport Ultra HDD, and a 2T HDD, but due to the convenient iCloud, they are just laying on the shelf and seldom used. (Although we should use them as a backup, we're just a little lazy...). I thought I shouldn't waste them.

5. SSDs are cheaper than ever in China due to competition from domestic storage companies. Money from 1-year 2T iCloud storage can buy me a 1T Samsung T7 SSD.

So I'm trying to turn off Photos sync and move all the photos to external SSDs/HDDs. Here are my plans:

1. 1T SSD for me, 2T for my wife as the first backup, and share a 5T HDD as the second backup.

2. 1T SSD for other family members as the first backup, and share a 2T HDD as the second backup.

3. All important files are also saved on laptop's internal storage and on iCloud and Google Drive.(using the free plan)

The moving part is actually pretty easy; I just copy the photos library to an external drive and set it as the primary library, then change to original photos in iCloud settings and wait a long time for the Photos app to download all.

I found one iCloud was just downloading normally, but another with normal "Downloading xxx Originals" but stuck without acutal downloading no matter I restarted Macbook or reopened Photos. So I selected all the photos and chose File > Play Slideshow, which made Photos to download finally and quickly rather than just leaving it alone to download in the background.

After all the downloads, I deleted the library file on Macbook and iOS, turned off Photos iCloud sync.

More unsuccessful attempts and tips:

1. I tried to download all the original photos and export all to ssd, but I found it time-consuming.

2. Opening a folder with a large number of photos on SSD is very slow. I can't find free and better software than Photos on MacOS to manage those TB-sized photos.

3. Apple Data and Privacy is another way to download all your photos. I chose to let Apple divide 25GB per file to download, but I found the download process is unstable, which made me confused about whether all the files are downloaded.

4. Do not unzip large .zip files and manage a large number of photos directly on HDD, which will take a lot of time. HDDs are better as second backup for SSD.

As an iPhone user, I’m confused which cloud storage subscription I should pick. iCloud or Google One for storing family files and photos. Subscription costs being the same. Pls help decide.

found my old ipad that i hadnt used for years. i know it photos on it that were really important to me. charged it and looked in the photos album and they were all there and i was so excited.. then a few minutes later i took a screenshot and then the entire album got wiped right before my eyes. years of photos. they’re not in recently deleted. not in icloud photos either. i dont know what to do anymore. why does apple do this? they didnt even ask for permission or throw an error it just all got wiped.

im devastated and none of their useless support articles help. please tell me if theres anything i can do. if theres some way to restore a backup or something i dont know

I discovered a few days ago that I’m missing at least hundreds of photos that were visible in iCloud for years across multiple devices. For years I have paid extra for iCloud storage to avoid this type of data loss. FWIW, most of my photos were not lost, but these missing photos have particularly high sentimental value.

The day before I discovered the photos missing, I did a factory reset of an old iPhone I hadn’t used in many years.

The first time I spoke with Apple the guy told me I had done nothing wrong. The second person in the “photos” department was much more evasive and defensive and implied it was somehow my fault but couldn’t provide an explanation other than saying I deleted them myself, or my use of a VPN could have been the problem and therefore my fault.

After hours on the phone Apple said there was nothing that could be done and there was a “permanent data loss.”

Did I do something wrong? What bothers me is that when I see photos in iCloud on devices that didn’t take the picture, I assume they are backed up and so, for example, if someone stole my iPhone I wouldn’t have to worry about losing photos or other data.

Thanks.

edit: Apple explicitly refers to iCloud as backup.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/108770

I recently transferred (not backed up) 45 GB of photos and videos—including Live photos—from my iCloud to an external hard drive. A month later, I tried to export a photo from the hard drive to my iPhone when realized I hadn’t done the transfer properly. While the hard drive shows 45 GB of content, when I click on the videos I only see thumbnails, live photos don’t work, and like I mentioned— I can’t export any photos to my MacBook, AirDrop, or back into iCloud.

After speaking with an Apple consultant for 2 hours, I found out that only thumbnails for the 13,000 photos and videos were transferred—not the actual files. The worst part is that the only way to recover any photos is by taking screenshots, and unfortunately, my videos are gone for good 🥲

Still trying to be hopeful that somehow I can get the data recovered, but I think I’m just being stubborn at this point

My Apple ID was hacked by someone pretending to be Goldman Sachs bank helping me with a fraudulent charge. They got in and changed my trusted phone number. Have spent countless hours on the phone with apple and they are absolutely no help. They claim the only way is to figure out the trusted phone number and I only know it ends in 22. I see other people have had this issue before, has anyone ever been able to get back in without it? Or does anyone know of a class action law suit I could get in on? Would do anything to get it back, it has my whole life from the last 10+ years saved in it. So upsetting!

I'm trying to reduce the amount of space used in my iCloud so I can downgrade my plan but my MacBook doesn't have enough storage to hold all the photos. Is it possible to maybe download like half of my photos and then delete them from iCloud?

Also, what is the best way to get the original quality photos off iCloud and onto a hard drive?

I want to keep a copy of my photos (nearly 24,000) on a hard drive but am struggling to figure out the most efficient way to get them from iCloud Photos to the hard drive. Any advice? And do I need a specific type of hard drive? Mine is 10+ years old.

Thanks, all, for the help. I don’t have a Mac, and downloading photos to export them has been taking ages. I’ll check out your suggestions—thank you!

I pay for 2TB of iCloud storage, yet my iPhone is always full, and it’s driving me insane. I’m the family keeper of all the photos—we’ve talking over 100,000 since 1940. I’ve tried to clean them up, but deleting is a nightmare sometimes, and uploading takes forever.

My current system: • Photos are stored on my iPhone and synced to iCloud Photos (optimize iPhone storage checked) • I also manually back up some photos in iCloud Drive to folders but since there aren’t thumbnails it takes forever to find the photo I’m looking for among other logistical nightmares.

I’ve tried saving them to a hard drive, but it kept crashing, so I gave up on that. I’m open to switching to another platform, but I need something that:

1. Doesn’t take up space on my iPhone or computer (but lets me access the photos easily).

2. Handles massive libraries without constant uploading/freezing issues.

3. Is reliable and won’t randomly lose photos.

I’m at my wit’s end trying to keep this organized. What solutions do you recommend? Anyone else with a similar massive photo library figured this out?

Please help me before I lose my mind.

why is that since all my photos were downloaded to icloud and i choose not to keep the originals in gallery? My storage is the same as before i bought the extra icloud storage

ps i have ip14 and i didnt upgrade to 18.2

Hi I just discovered not a single photo from my iPhone has been synced with my iCloud since I installed the 18.1 update. Anyone else having this issue and know what to do? I already toggled the sync on and off and restarted my device. Thanks

How do I upload all of it to icloud?

For reference these photos dont exist on my mac anymore since i had to reset/wipe it.

ty in advance!

Hey,

I want to cancel my 200gb iCloud subscription as I have a way bigger photos library and want to use another cloud provider.

How can I ensure that all photos & videos within the Photos app on my Mac are downloaded? I turned on the specific setting "keep originals on this Mac" but it does not seem to download everything stored online (as my iCloud is completely full and photos is not syncing anymore).

While the setting is turned on, I disabled wifi to make some random checks but many videos were not playing and a warning message like "some failure with downloading a better quality for this video from icloud occurred".

Does anyone have any experiences or tips to share how to get everything down save without losing any memories?

I read that it could be an option to upgrade to 2TB for a month, let everything sync and then download and then cancel/delete/downgrade my plan, but I think that may take forever to sync (~700GB total library, which surprisingly is shown on my Mac, but still some photos & videos seem to be missing/not fully downloaded)

Any help is much appreciated, thanks!

Hi all, very quick question. Can iCloud be used to free up memory on an iPhone? Like can I store 40gb of photos/vids on iCloud and have that free up space on my phone by those photos being removed off my device?

Hi I want to remove all my photos from the iPhone, but keep a backup in iCloud. How can I do it? Thanks

My wife and I have used Google Photos for years and have decided to switch to iCloud. All the pictures have all just finished transferring to my account. What are my next steps to make sure that my wife sees all the same photos and her stuff gets uploaded to the same library? I want to be sure I’m not missing anything.

Hi everyone!
This is bugging me a lot. So I’ve bought the new iPhone 16 Pro with 1 TB storage. I previously only had 128 GB.

What I wanna do now is to transfer all photos in full quality (we’re speaking of 200 GB iCloud Photos) onto my new iPhone. Afterwards I wanna downgrade the iCloud plan to the free one. I just don’t wanna pay every month for something I don’t need anymore and wanna use iCloud only for notes, mail etc. This could be done easily with the free 5 GB.

Is there any convenient way to transfer all my photos from iCloud and keep them in my normal photo gallery on the iPhone? It’s about 55k photos in total.

Hi all,

I’m trying to back up about 20,000 photos and videos to iCloud (I have 2TB storage) but in approximately 12 hours only 4,800 pictures have been uploaded and the status says ‘Restoring’ instead of syncing. I’ve tried talking to Apple Support and reading up on the internet but I can’t figure out what’s causing it to take forever. Any help is appreciated

I'm uploading a lot of files.

It randomly fails on files, won't let you upload multiple folders of files.

When it does fail on multiple files, it puts them into a list box you can't copy paste from. You can't see progress once that list box is on the screen so you don't know if it's finished uploading and it's the full list of failures or not.

It's just terrible and clearly not designed for backing stuff up which is weird since that is the main reason someone would use this UI.

I have been paying for my Google One for 4 years with my androids and recently switched to an apple-user with most of the devices in the ecosystem. I have been received a lot of notifications on my storage is full as well as icloud storage.

I am contemplating to switch from Google Drive to iCloud; however, it is a hassle as I tried it before and it didn’t work out well.

Should I keep using Google One? Or should I switch back to iCloud as an apple user?

My parents have an older iMac with Bug Sur installed. There are two Photos libraries on it, one spans 2010 to 2015 and one spans 2014 to 2018. It is not connected to iCloud. Some of the photos are on my parents iCloud Photos account but some are not.

What is the best/easiest/fastest way to get photos from these old libraries into their current iCloud Photos library?

Best would be if I could upload all and duplicates would be dealt with. Worst case I could select the ones we think are missing and want to upload.

Oki, I have also been down the road of icloud. Spent hours reading and researching. My family use google photos for sharing photos and albums. We all have only apple devices. I was checking the possibility to walk over to apple on photo sharing.

1. The library.photos can't be stored on a NAS. WTH apple!? You sell storage on you website, why can't we store this on a NAS?

2. Apple shared albums - It kills the quality on photos and videos.... WHY?

3. Apple shared library - Can't share albums. So all users have to create their own albums.

What is apple thinking? I can't even see how they gain anything in these solutions, other than loosing users to competitors. Google photos stores full quality photos, and works better on iPhones then photos do?Why do apple create these "awesome" phones and hardware when you can not share media you create from it with a simple few clicks.

1. What is the point with iCloud Drive and iCloud plan with 2 tb or more? You can't connect any nas or automation to it. You can't have Time Machine backups backup to it. It is not possible to mass download from any services from apple.

This is not a closed down system, it is damn stupid. The amount of stupidity on these choices if baffling to me. Have I completely misunderstood what this service or what? I can not figure out or try to think of the gain on making this so stupid or is it the complete lack of skillful developers in apple to create this? I don't think it is the reason, so why?

so i bought 50GB of storage for my phone and once i purchased around 6000 photos and videos have disappeared from my iphone?

can anyone explain or help me? or maybe a way i could possibly get them back. i’ve reached out to apple (?) for help but i don’t really know who the right person to speak to is or what i can do :/

I'm running out of room on my Mac and iPhone, but have enough in iCloud as I already purchase. I never wanted to not have photos stored locally, but I'm not sure what else to do right now.

is there a serious risk of losing photos forever if they are "optimized"? I am just a bit worried about Apple Photos libraries going corrupt or somehow photos corrupting in the cloud.

If I delete pics on my phone does it delete it on the cloud too ? Same way, if I delete it on the photos app on my PC does it get deleted from my phone too ? Thanks