iCloud really provides a great way of keeping all your important stuff on Mac or iOS devices safe in the form of a backup. It turns out to be really handy with your Photos as well owing to the fact that your photos are backed up in iCloud Photo Library from where you can download them anytime. However, if you are just starting out, you may not know how to download photos from iCloud as that’s the question we get to answer quite frequently. Here we’ll be pushing aside all possible complexities involved in downloading pictures you have on iCloud Library within the Photos app installed on your Mac, iPhone or iPad, offering the most simple and direct method for downloading pictures. Besides, you’ll get to know how you can download all photos you have on iCloud and exactly how you can download them one by one or only a few selected ones.
Jump To Section:
- How To Download Photos From iCloud On Your Windows PC or Mac OS X
- How To Download All Photos From iCloud
- How To Download Photos From iCloud Backups Or iTunes Backups
How To Download Photos From iCloud On Your Windows PC or Mac OS X
If you have one or several pictures stored on your iCloud and you’re looking to download raw file to your Windows PC or Mac, here is how you can be able to do it.
- Launch your Web browser on PC or Mac and visit iCloud
- Login to your account with your Apple Login details
- Click “Photos” icon after logging into your account on iCloud
- Click and select the photo that you have to download
- Once your chosen photo is loaded, take a look at top right side of your browser window and you will see a small download icon. The icon appears as a could having downward arrow. Just click this icon for downloading the photo to your computer
- The same process can be repeated for downloading other photos, as many as you may like
The picture will be downloaded to your system’s default downloads folderwhere you can find it in original resolution. Usually, this folder is named Downloads.
So, that’s how to download Photos from iCloud on your computer. The process doesn’t change with browsers and it really does not matter if you are using a Windows PC or Mac, Linux, or even Android, this method would work fine on all platforms.
How To Download All Photos From iCloud?
Downloading pictures one by one can quickly become hectic and embarrassing. So what you can do for downloading all the pictures you have on iCloud at once? If you have already used iCloud on your Mac, you’d probably know that there is no “download all” option available. Besides, you can’t even access the iCloud Photos using iCloud Drive from where you could have copied them to your Mac/PC or iOS device. The functionality would be great if added to upcoming versions but for now that’s not possible. So, with what’s available right now, you’re required to download your pictures manually if you’re required to access them locally on your device. So, here is the way around for downloading all photos from iCloud to your Mac or Windows PC. Follow the steps given below:
- Launch your Web browser on PC or Mac and visit iCloud.com
- Login to your account with your Apple Login details
- Click “Photos” icon after logging into your account on iCloud
- Select the album labeled “All Photos”
- Scroll down to bottom of this album and then click on “Select Photos” on top of Photos bar in iCloud
- Press and hold Shift key from the keyboard and then click on last picture that you have in this album. Doing so will select all the photos on the album and you’ll be notified about the number of photos being selected from iCloud Photos bar.
- With all your photos selected now, you can click onblue-colored “Download” button that you can see on top of Photos bar
- On the confirmation prompt, confirm that you’re looking to download every single selected photo and click the “Download” button
This will download all the selected photos in pretty much the same fashion as downloading other files or single photos one by one. The downloaded photos will be available in Downloads folder once the process is completed. You can change download folder if you want to.
With no “Download All” or “Select All” option available, you can use shift+clickmethod for selecting all the contents of the album just as described above. That’s probably the only way of downloading all the photos directly in one go.
Of course, there are other options available for downloading photos from iCloud as well, however, they necessitate using iCloud Photo Library and Photos app in iOS or Mac OS X and this makes them out of reach of all Windows users. Besides, iCloud Photo Library should be automatically managing and handling your photos if you’re using that service. The photos will be uploaded to iCloud automatically and you can download them whenever needed.However, if you have a big photo library or you don’t have a solid internet connection, you might find it all quite cumbersome. In addition, this feature can result in excessive data usage and some curious aspects can make this feature quite challenging to be used.
There is another option available to Windows users that allows them to download all photos on iCloud. They can download the iCloud Software and install it on their Windows PC. Afterwards they can be able to copy photos from file browser. The process described below works on Windows 10.
- Install iCloud Sync software and set it up on your PC;here is the iCloud
- After installing iCloud sync for Windows, locate “iCloud Photos” and select them from Windows File Explorer
- Select “Download Photos and Videos” option in navigation bar of file explorer
- When prompted, select date/years of the pictures that you are interested in downloading
- iCloud will now download photos chosen by you to Windows and they will be available in \Pictures\iCloud\Pictures\Downloads\
Though it may take some time for downloading all your photos to your PC using this particular method and it usually depends on your internet connection speed and the number of pictures that you want to download.
How To Download Photos From iCloud Backups Or iTunes Backups
If you are using iCloud for some time then you might probably know already that backups on iCloud are considered separate from the Photo Library. Backing up your iPhone/iPad to iCloud will give you access to these pictures directly. However, iCloud backups do not work this way. They actually come as complete backups for entire devices. So, photos can also be downloaded from iTunes and iCloud backups made from your iPhone, iPod or iPad but for that you will either have to restore your device with that particular iCloud backup or use some third party tool in case of iTunes backup.
So, that’s exactly how to download Photos from iCloud. All the different alternatives described above work fine and have been tried and tested for downloading Photos from iCloud for their respective option.If you have any queries, get in touch through comments section below. And, if you have already downloaded photos from iCloud using a different method, do share with our readers.
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