{"id":23708,"date":"2021-06-03T06:40:02","date_gmt":"2021-06-03T13:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=23708"},"modified":"2021-06-13T15:31:26","modified_gmt":"2021-06-13T22:31:26","slug":"back-up-icloud-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/back-up-icloud-photos\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Back Up iCloud Photos When Your Only Mac Can’t Store Originals"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"ICloud
ICloud Photo Library Optimize Storage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My friend Diane was visiting her granddaughter, and, as one does, she was giving tech support to her daughter-in-law. She wanted to bounce ideas off of someone so she brought me in with the \u201cphone a friend\u201d option.<\/p>\n

The problem to be solved was one I hadn\u2019t given much thought to, but which I suspect many people face. Her daughter-in-law had a 256GB MacBook Air, and as often happens, her Photos Library wouldn\u2019t fit on her internal disk.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not intimately familiar with iCloud Photo Library, let me explain the two options. You can choose to have full-sized images download to your device or you can choose optimized images. The optimized images option gives you thumbnails of every photo in your library, and when you select a thumbnail, it downloads the full-sized image. It also has some other magic sauce that is supposed to keep your most recent and most recently accessed images in full size for quick retrieval. If you’ve got a good Internet connection, it’s kind of the best of both worlds – all of your full-sized images are available on-demand but you don’t pay for local storage for all that data.<\/p>\n

Since Diane\u2019s daughter-in-law has only a 256GB drive in her Mac, she has been running with optimized images with iCloud Photo Library. This works perfectly for her. But she realized that she doesn’t have a backup of the full-sized images as they only<\/em> exist on Apple’s servers. She wanted a way to back up these images locally, which is a very reasonable thing to expect to be able to do.<\/p>\n

If she was a geek, she’d probably also have a Mac mini or an iMac with a bigger drive where the full-res images could be stored, and she could run backups from that machine. But how do you back up the full-res images if you don’t<\/em> have a bigger Mac onto which to download the images? This was a question I’d never pondered before.<\/p>\n

Before calling me, Diane tried to change the Photos Library on the Mac in question to full-sized images, since she really had no idea how big the library actually was. It ran overnight and eventually stopped when it ran out of disk space. This put the MacBook Air in a bad state where doing just about anything caused an alert about not having enough disk space. Diane flipped it back to optimized, but it didn’t obey until she rebooted the Mac. The MacBook Air was back in fighting shape but the question of how to back up the photos was still in play.<\/p>\n

Diane and I noodled the problem together. We first walked through whether there was some way to download the photos to an external drive. Technically it is<\/em> possible to have your Photos Library on an external drive, but it\u2019s one of those tricks that you have to fuss with all the time, and she\u2019d have to always have this external drive tethered to her notebook. Not really a clean solution.<\/p>\n

Diane asked whether there was some way to use iCloud.com to help with this problem. I did some experiments and found a solution that definitely will work. It’s a bit of a tedious process, and it does involve a very nerdy step, but no bit of it is technically difficult. We\u2019re going to download all of the photos from icloud.com to an external drive, but we have to do a couple of things first.<\/p>\n

Step 1: Change the location of downloads in your web browser<\/h3>\n

By default, your browser is probably set to put any downloads into your Downloads folder. Since our goal is to get these full-sized images onto an external drive, we need the downloads to go to the external drive. I’ll use Safari as an example of the steps to achieve this.<\/p>\n

In Safari, open Safari Preferences, and on the General tab you\u2019ll find a dropdown for File Download Location. Change it from its current location (probably Downloads) to the option \u201cOther…\u201d and then choose the external drive.<\/p>\n

\"Safari
Safari Preferences Change Download Location<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Step 2: Log into iCloud.com<\/h3>\n
\"Select
Select Photos under Library<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Next, navigate to icloud.com<\/a>, authenticate, and open Photos. We want to make sure all of the photos in the library are available, so on the left sidebar, make sure that Photos is chosen under where it says Library, not Favorites or any other option.<\/p>\n

In the toolbar above the images, you\u2019ll see a slider to change the size of the thumbnails. We\u2019re going to be selecting a lot<\/em> of images, so I\u2019d suggest sliding all the way to the left for the smallest thumbnails possible.<\/p>\n

Step 3: Download Images<\/h3>\n
\"Select
Select Photos under Library<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the upper right, you should see five icons.<\/p>\n