Photos: "Download Originals to this Mac"

[swordio777]

HI there, I'm a long-time photographer and usually pretty savvy with DAMs (used Aperture for years), however I just cannot wrap my head around the way Apple Photos integrates with iCloud.

I'm not an Apple Photos user, but my wife is. She has over 50,000 photos uploaded to iCloud photos, with optimize iPhone storage turned on. Even so, with this number of photos, her phone storage is full to bursting.

So I was recently tasked with backing up all her photos to our Mac . I did this by creating a brand new Photos library and turning on iCloud Photos. I also turned on "Download Originals to this Mac". This appears to have downloaded everything successfully to a local drive.

My question is this: if my wife starts purging the photos on her phone, will this delete the original version stored on my mac? (I know it'll delete the full-size files from iCloud, but as I have 'iCloud Photos' turned on, will it also delete them from my mac as soon as I next open Photos for Mac?).
If this is going to happen then I guess I'll need to turn off internet access on the mac before opening Photos, then open the app and export all originals to a safe location before turning the wifi back on!? If there's an alternative option I'd be interested to hear that too.

Thank you in advance for your help / advice.

 

[Jumpthesnark]

I don't use Photos, and I don't use iCloud Photos, but this may help: If you want to download original photos from your phone to your Mac, use Image Capture. It's in your Applications folder. Create a folder on your Mac, connect your phone to your Mac using USB, open up Image Capture and you can move as few or as many photos as you want to that folder.

When you're done you can delete images from your phone using the same app.

It does not have the wireless convenience of using iCloud, but it is great for knowing you're storing original-sized images directly from your phone, and managing the deletion of images on your phone, without worrying about whether you're deleting something from your photo archive.

I know this is a different solution than what you were asking about, but it may provide the solution you wanted - transfer of iPhone photos to your Mac, and management of the photos on your iPhone.

Good luck!

 

[swordio777]

Thank you for taking the time to reply, @Jumpthesnark. I appreciate it.

I do use Image Capture when backing up the photos from my own iPhone & iPad as neither of those are connected to iCloud Photos, so it's a great solution for me.

However the reason I tried using the Photos app to backup my wife's images was because she already had iCloud Photos turned on, with the "Optimize iPhone Storage" setting turned on. That meant her phone only had small & compressed versions of all the photos stored locally so Image Capture wouldn't work for backing up her images. I could have tried downloading everything from icloud.com, however I believe you're limited to selecting and downloading 500 images at a time. (Likely not a severe limitation for most, but as my wife has over 50k photos it's not how I wanted to spend an entire weekend.)

Thanks for your response

 

[Jumpthesnark]

Thank you for taking the time to reply, @Jumpthesnark. I appreciate it.

I do use Image Capture when backing up the photos from my own iPhone & iPad as neither of those are connected to iCloud Photos, so it's a great solution for me.

However the reason I tried using the Photos app to backup my wife's images was because she already had iCloud Photos turned on, with the "Optimize iPhone Storage" setting turned on. That meant her phone only had small & compressed versions of all the photos stored locally so Image Capture wouldn't work for backing up her images. I could have tried downloading everything from icloud.com, however I believe you're limited to selecting and downloading 500 images at a time. (Likely not a severe limitation for most, but as my wife has over 50k photos it's not how I wanted to spend an entire weekend.)

Thanks for your response

Yeah, it's kind of a chore, but I tend to do it a couple times a year. Doing all 50k at once though, oof. That would be a heavy lift. I hope there's a solution that works!

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Wow 50,000 is a lot of images. Allowing a mere 3 seconds per image you're talking over 40 hours just to review them all. I would be thinking in terms of a long term project. First weed, then transfer. I am willing to bet there are a lot of near dupes and maybe even more than a few 'Why did I take that?' in the collection.

Alternatively bring down 500-1000 images then weed on the computer, but of course that leaves the culls still sitting in the cloud.

 

[swordio777]

Thank you both for your input, @Jumpthesnark and @OldMacs4Me.

Yeah, it's a big job. There will indeed be many duplicates in her collection and I definitely agree that culling would be wise. I'll see if I can convince her to take that step! 😅

Thanks.

 

[olavsu1]

Why do we have to use all kinds of weird apps to import images? Why can't we use the normal file browser (in macos called as Finder) that exists on every computer for this? The file browser does see the mobile phone, but it opens a strange view, but actually it could just show the directory tree of the mobile phone.

 

[RhetTbull]

> my wife starts purging the photos on her phone, will this delete the original version stored on my mac?

Yes.

I am the author of a free open source tool osxphotos than can export the photos from her Photos library (including options to export metadata via sidecars, embedded in EXIF/XMP, etc.) It gives you full control over export naming scheme, etc. See docs here. You could run this to create a full backup of her library that resides outside Photos then purge away in Photos. If you run the export command with the --update flag (see tutorial) then it will update any new/modified photos but not delete the previously exported images. If her Photos library is on an APFS formatted drive (default for all modern Macs) and you export to the same volume, osxphotos uses "copy-on-write" technology so that exported photos take no additional space on the drive.

 

[RhetTbull]

By the way, osxphotos can help with cleaning up a library by finding "bad photos". Photos uses machine learning to apply "scores" to photos and videos that are not normally accessible to the user. osxphotos can search for photos with a low quality score and add these to an album from where you can then review and delete them.

osxphotos query --query-eval "photo.score.overall < 0.1" --query-eval "'Document' not in photo.labels"  --add-to-album "Bad Photos"

This command finds photos with an overall score of < 0.1 (you can play with this value to find what works for you) and also photos that the ML has not labeled as "documents" as these often have low scores because they're not aesthetic and adds them to the album "Bad Photos" which will be created if it doesn't already exist.

In additional to "overall", these are all the scores available (all range from 0.0 to 1.0):

overall: float
curation: float
promotion: float
highlight_visibility: float
behavioral: float
failure: float
harmonious_color: float
immersiveness: float
interaction: float
interesting_subject: float
intrusive_object_presence: float
lively_color: float
low_light: float
noise: float
pleasant_camera_tilt: float
pleasant_composition: float
pleasant_lighting: float
pleasant_pattern: float
pleasant_perspective: float
pleasant_post_processing: float
pleasant_reflection: float
pleasant_symmetry: float
sharply_focused_subject: float
tastefully_blurred: float
well_chosen_subject: float
well_framed_subject: float
well_timed_shot: float

 

[swordio777]

Thanks for your comments, @RhetTbull - I'll check it out