How to download all your iCloud photos to your MacĪs we said above, one of the benefits of using iCloud Photo Library is that it makes it possible to view all your photos on all of your devices. We’ll walk through a variety of ways to get your iCloud photos onto your Mac below. (We have a full tutorial onīacking up your iPhone Photo Library here.) In this article we show how to download the images stored in Apple’s iCloud to your Mac, whether you want to grab individual or selected photos, make a backup of photos so you can delete them from your iPhone, or download the whole lot in one go so that you can back them up. You want to do a full back up of your Photo library (bearing in mind that if you stop using iCloud Photo Library, or paying for iCloud storage, you will want to download your photos first).You want to download full resolution versions of your photos for access when offline.

You may want to grab a photo from your iCloud Photo Library but you aren’t on your Mac.In other words, you may be able to view your photos on your Mac, but if you wanted a high-resolution version you might need to download it from iCloud. In order for your photos not to take up gigabytes of space on your devices, Apple uploads a full-res version to iCloud while showing a low-res version of on your device. Perhaps you want to use a full-resolution version of a photo in a presentation, or to send to a friend or family member.You might want to download copies of your iCloud photos to your Mac so that you can back them up – perhaps because you need to reclaim some of the space currently given to your Photo library by archiving old images.You may want to remove photos from your iPhone but when you try to delete them it says they will be removed from iCloud and all your devices and you don’t want to do that!.

Download all icloud photos mac