Backup Entire iCloud Photo Library to external drive? Any application that does this?

[Phat^Trance]

I have over 130.000 photos and videos on my icloud / mac, and wanted to see with you guys if there are any free backup applications that syncs the current photo library and back it up on a external drive, and also sync them so that i dont have to backup entire library each time (only syncs the latest photos added after the previous sync).

Are there any applications that does it for free? 🙂

 

[pgolik]

I used Happy Photo Exporter by Cool Ant Software (available in App Store). It's free, and it does what you need. The only caveat is, that if you use the "Optimize Mac Storage" setting, it will download full size versions of each photo in your library, so you need to make sure that you have enough free storage. This storage is later labeled as "purgeable", meaning that macOS will ofload the pictures back to icloud when you need the space (there's no easy way of forcing this manually).

 

[Phat^Trance]

I used Happy Photo Exporter by Cool Ant Software (available in App Store). It's free, and it does what you need. The only caveat is, that if you use the "Optimize Mac Storage" setting, it will download full size versions of each photo in your library, so you need to make sure that you have enough free storage. This storage is later labeled as "purgeable", meaning that macOS will ofload the pictures back to icloud when you need the space (there's no easy way of forcing this manually).

I already have a full size copy of the photos on my Mac. So it doesn't need to download the stuff from iCloud. Does that work?

 

[FreakinEurekan]

I already have a full size copy of the photos on my Mac. So it doesn't need to download the stuff from iCloud. Does that work?

If you’re using “download and keep originals” then any backup software will work (e.g. Time Machine)

 

[Basic75]

If you’re using “download and keep originals” then any backup software will work (e.g. Time Machine)

Yes, or rsync. It can do incremental backups and is included with macOS.

 

[pgolik]

I already have a full size copy of the photos on my Mac. So it doesn't need to download the stuff from iCloud. Does that work?

It does, and it offers incremental backup which is what you want. As the others mentioned, in your case any backup software will work (your Photos library is internally just a folder of files). However, the way original photos are organized in the library is rather cryptic, so if you want to browse your exported copies, you may still want to look at the app I mentioned, which will organize your photos in a year/month folder structure upon exporting.

 

[Mike Boreham]

I used Happy Photo Exporter by Cool Ant Software (available in App Store). It's free, and it does what you need.

Thanks. I had a look and as far as I can see it only organises the downloaded photos by exif date. I have 90,000 photos and vids in my Photos lib, going back to the 1880s. Many of these do not have a meaningfull exif date (being copies or scans) so I have an organisational structure of some 800 Albums in a Folder structure. Happy Photo Exporter would need to preserve my structure to be useful.

In fact I have always maintained a separate copy of all 90,000 in a simple Finder structure on an external, but it has got out of step with the Photos Lib so if Happy Photos Exporter preserved my folders and albums I would use it.