Does anyone have advice on a reliable workflow to incrementally back up a large iCloud photo library to an external hard drive using a Windows 10 PC? Also, does anyone know why, since upgrading to the iPhone 12 Pro, photos I'm taking that upload to iCloud can only be downloaded on a Windows PC in reduced resolution?? (1536x2048).
Here's some more detail on my issues:
I have a 2 TB family iCloud account. All three family members are avid photographers. We probably have more than 30,000 photos and videos between us. Until recently I used our one household Mac to download date ranges of photos through the Photos app and then export them to an external HDD. I would do this every 6 months to incrementally back up new photos/videos. It mostly worked well though but was time consuming. But the Mac recently died and we are much more adept at Windows, so we are not going to fix this Mac.
We have an up-to-date Windows 10 PC and I just installed the latest iCloud on it. Looks like the way it works is to automatically download low-res thumbnails and, if you open one or you select a range of them and right click then select "always keep on this PC" then it downloads the high res version.
But there's a weird problem. Any photos I took with my iPhone 12 are downloading at 1536x2048. This occurs whether I use the Windows iCloud app through Windows Explorer or I use iCloud in a browser. It doesn't matter if I download with the browser using "Unmodified Original" or "Most Compatible". No matter what, I get the reduced res photo. If I go back in my library to a photo shot with my prior Xs Max, I get the full resolution photo. If I go to my iPad and look at the recent photos shot with my iPhone 12 that downloaded through iCloud to my iPad, they are full res (according to a look at Exif data). So, somehow iCloud has the full res photos, because my iPad is getting them, but any form of access through Windows is getting the reduced res version, no matter how I download them. And this messes up my planned backup workflow on the PC.
Any help with a general backup workflow on PC would be great! Any solutions to this weird resolution problem would also be helpful, though for that one it's likely Apple will need to patch something.
Here's some more detail on my issues:
I have a 2 TB family iCloud account. All three family members are avid photographers. We probably have more than 30,000 photos and videos between us. Until recently I used our one household Mac to download date ranges of photos through the Photos app and then export them to an external HDD. I would do this every 6 months to incrementally back up new photos/videos. It mostly worked well though but was time consuming. But the Mac recently died and we are much more adept at Windows, so we are not going to fix this Mac.
We have an up-to-date Windows 10 PC and I just installed the latest iCloud on it. Looks like the way it works is to automatically download low-res thumbnails and, if you open one or you select a range of them and right click then select "always keep on this PC" then it downloads the high res version.
But there's a weird problem. Any photos I took with my iPhone 12 are downloading at 1536x2048. This occurs whether I use the Windows iCloud app through Windows Explorer or I use iCloud in a browser. It doesn't matter if I download with the browser using "Unmodified Original" or "Most Compatible". No matter what, I get the reduced res photo. If I go back in my library to a photo shot with my prior Xs Max, I get the full resolution photo. If I go to my iPad and look at the recent photos shot with my iPhone 12 that downloaded through iCloud to my iPad, they are full res (according to a look at Exif data). So, somehow iCloud has the full res photos, because my iPad is getting them, but any form of access through Windows is getting the reduced res version, no matter how I download them. And this messes up my planned backup workflow on the PC.
Any help with a general backup workflow on PC would be great! Any solutions to this weird resolution problem would also be helpful, though for that one it's likely Apple will need to patch something.