I can’t figure out how to move my entire photo library in iCloud to an external hard drive. Please don’t tell me this can’t be done. My laptop doesn’t have enough space to download everything so it needs to somehow skip downloading on the computer? It seems absurd to have to buy a new computer just so I can back up my photos.
Download iCloud photos from the iCloud website, then move the downloaded photos to the external hard drive.
Please go to iCloud.com and sign in with your Apple ID to download.
you can use icloudpd from the terminal to download all your iCloud photos to a given destination folder, e.g. on a external hd/ssd.
Basic steps:
install python on the Mac if you haven’t done so already - below Iiis done via brew. Of course if Python is already installed on your system, you can skip this step.
brew install python
Once python is finished installing, you can install icloud_photos_downloader package with pip using the following command:
pip install icloudpd
Then you are ready to use it to download photos directly form iCloud Photos using the iCloud API.
You’ll want to specify a folder to download the photos to, and also include your Apple ID and password like so:
I'm assuming right now you have Photos-->Preferences-->iCloud-->iCloud Photos set to "Optimize Mac Storage", but you want to have the full library stored on an external drive.
Here's what I would do:
Shut down Photos.
Hold down the OPTION key while you click on the Photos icon to start it again. You'll get a window to find or create another library, as shown below.
Click "Create New".
Using the little triangle near "where" if necessary, navigate to the external drive where you want to put the new library, and hit OK.
Photos opens up in the new library.
Go to Photos-->Preferences-->General and click "Use as System Photo Library". This tells photos to use THIS (new) library to sync with iCloud Photos. The old library will no longer be synced and will remain where it is. You can have multiple Photos libraries, but only ONE can be designated the System photo library for use with iCloud Photos.
Go to Photos-->Preferences-->iCloud to turn ON "Download Originals to this Mac".
Close the preferences window.
On the left, try selecting "Library", because IIRC if you scroll to the bottom in the right-side pane, there might be a status message telling you the download progress.
It may take awhile for all the photos to get downloaded (maybe even a couple of days?).
Once you are very satisfied everything is working with the new library, you can delete the old library on your boot drive.
