Jun 04, 2018 For backing up your photos and videos from Apple’s native Photos app, nothing beats the ease and simplicity of using Apple’s iCloud Photo Library. Your iCloud Photo Library Explained! Your iCloud Photo Library is a backup AND a photo-sync service.
- How to back up your iCloud Photo Library. If you have iCloud Photo Library and want to back up all your photos to a storage device attached to your Mac you can follow the guide above, but you will.
- Jan 05, 2020 If you want your Mac's photos to wirelessly sync to all your other iOS devices and computers, you want to set up iCloud Photo Library: Apple's photo sync service lets you back up your images on all your devices, as well as access them — online or offline — on said devices.If you're willing to pay for the extra iCloud storage space, you can store an incredible amount of photos and videos.
The last few years brought us so many advances in phone camera technology that it’s safe to say your iPhone — with three 12 MP lenses of various optical focal lengths — is more of a camera now than an actual phone (what was the last time you called someone?). In addition, new powerful processing chips mean that in-phone photo enhancements have now reached the level that was only accessible to the most powerful desktop setups before.
As a result, we take more pictures than ever. We record our daily lives on an hourly basis and require dozens of selfies to get that perfect Instagram shot. Combine this with increased megapixel count on each photo and you get heavy and overflowing photo libraries, which quickly eat up all the available storage space on our devices. And since there’s virtually no way to upgrade your phone storage, apart from buying a new expensive phone, people turn to iCloud.
How To View Photos In iCloud
It’s hard to argue that iCloud is one of the best photo management solutions available to iPhone and Mac users. It offers cheap storage space, starting at $0.99 for 50 GB, native system integration, and convenient access via iOS, macOS, or web.
Essentially, iCloud is able to upload all your new photos in the background and make them available across your devices, thus offering storage, backup, and management features all at once.
Haven’t enabled iCloud yet? Here’s how to do it on your iPhone:
Go to Settings ➙ Your Name
Tap on iCloud and then Photos
Toggle iCloud Photos to on (and My Photo Stream if you like it)
On your Mac:
Navigate to System Preferences ➙ Apple ID
Check Photos
Type your password and click OK
However, even if lots of people do enable iCloud for their photo-storing needs, many of them simply dump their photo libraries there without any sorting or management, which leads to inflated storage costs and diminishes the value of this wonderful service. So here are some tips on how to select all iCloud photos, deselect them, delete all photos from iCloud, and more.
How to select all photos on iCloud
When you’re working with photos stored in your iCloud, you have to remember that it’s all online-based, hence some of your common and trusted shortcuts will work as usual, and some will not.
For example, you can’t right-click on any photos in your web iCloud to get a meaningful action menu. Similarly, if you want to select all photos in iCloud, you can’t rely on a menu bar command of Edit ➙ Select All.
Here’s how to select all photos in iCloud instead:
Log in to your account on icloud.com
Open Photos
Navigate to the appropriate collection
Either drag your cursor across the photos you like or use a shortcut of ⌘ + A
If you’re wondering how to select multiple photos on Mac, you can hold Shift and then use your arrow keys or click on the last photo you want to highlight. This will affect all the photos in a row. To select various non-sequential photos, you need to hold ⌘ and then pick everything you want by clicking with your cursor.
What do you do when you know how to select all on Mac? You might be interested in how to download multiple photos from iCloud, for example, which is very easy to do:
Select all the photos you want to download on icloud.com
Click the “Download selected items” icon in the top bar (looks like a cloud with an arrow pointing outward)
How to deselect all photos on iCloud
Knowing how to select all photos in iCloud is essential. But so is knowing how to deselect them — what if you select too many or just want to exclude a few you don’t like?
To cancel your photo selection, you can simply click anywhere outside of the selected photos. To deselect multiple photos in iCloud, hold ⌘ and click on the photos you don’t want to be highlighted.
How to turn off iCloud Photos
Import Photos From Icloud Photo Library To Mac
While iCloud Photos is a great option for managing your photo library, there are some cases where it might be better to turn it off. For example, when you have enough storage on your Mac and don’t want to pay extra or would like to find a better photo management solution.
To turn off iCloud Photos on iPhone:
Go to Settings ➙ Name
Then tap iCloud ➙ Photos
Turn iCloud Photos off
To do the same on Mac:
Go to System Preferences ➙ Apple ID
Uncheck Photos
The best way to manage photos on Mac
While iCloud Photos is one of the most widely used solutions for your pictures, it’s hardly the most feature-rich one. The web-based interface is relatively slow, doesn’t support all the image formats, and doesn’t offer much in terms of organizing your library. If you feel like you’ve maxed out iCloud Photos’s capabilities, there’s another great app you should try.
Inboard is a brilliant organizer for your digital photo library, Pinterest-like inspiration, and even screenshots — in a word, anything to do with a visual medium. As a native app, Inboard makes it easy to organize images in folders with tags, so you’ll be able to find them in seconds no matter how large your library grows.
How to delete duplicates to free up space
No matter how diligent you’re about manually managing your photos, given how many new pictures we take every day, you’ll not achieve the perfect result on your own. Some bad images will still creep in, you’ll keep discovering duplicate copies here and there, and, what’s even more prevalent, you’ll have hundreds (if not thousands) of nearly identical pictures from various events — all taking up gigabytes of space on your hard drive.
Gemini is the perfect utility to keep your digital library in check. With just a single scan, it goes through every folder on your Mac and finds not only unneeded duplicate files but also images looking so similar that it would be a waste to let them all stay.
To use Gemini and free your Mac of duplicate files:
Open the app and drop a folder (e.g. photo folder) onto its window
Click Scan for Duplicates
Go to Review Results
Select Smart Cleanup when satisfied
How to quickly transfer photos to Mac
It’s true that mostly people use iCloud Photos as a digital library, but some also like it because it gives them an easy way to transfer photos from iPhone to Mac. When you take a photo, iCloud automatically uploads it to the cloud in the background, where it becomes accessible by your Mac. But is there a better way?
AnyTrans for iOS is an all-in-one iPhone manager for Mac you absolutely need. Not only does it offer the fastest path for transferring images from iPhone to Mac, it also revolutionizes the way you’re able to control your media library, backups, apps, and even messages. Think of it as iTunes on steroids that is actually intuitive to use. And it has a built in audio and video downloader too.
So when it comes to figuring out how to select all photos on iCloud, or how to deselect them — it’s all easy steps. More importantly, you should know why you’re using iCloud at all and what benefits it gives you — because it might be a smart move to shift to something faster and native, such as Inboard, keep your library duplicate-free with Gemini, and transfer files in a snap with AnyTrans.
Best of all, Inboard, Gemini, and AnyTrans are available to you now absolutely free for seven days with a trial of Setapp, a platform with more than 170 better alternatives to the default Mac apps, from better wallpapers (Wallpaper Wizard) to better password management (Secrets). Try them all today with no obligations and see for yourself — why not?
Free up your space by transferring your Photos library to another external hard drive. By freeing up space you will have valuable space for your work on your Mac. In addition to this, we will help you to back up your whole photo library to iCloud.
Why store photos on external drive
In today’s world, everyone loves to capture photos of every single moment and wants to save all those moments in his/her personal devices like Mac. But saving all your photos can fill-up your Mac storage quickly and you may face the shortage of space.
There are many options to store your photos data. One of them to store your photos on iCloud photo library but the drawback of saving your photos on iCloud is, if you delete the photo from your device it will be deleted from iCloud as well.
One question raised up here is that what we can do to store all our photos to some safe place if we are running out of space on Mac?
Fortunately, you have visited the right place to find the solution to your problem. There is a safer and easy way to transfer your entire photo library from your Mac to your external drive. The best of this trick is whenever you need to see your photos on your Mac you just need to open photo library app on your Mac it will automatically take you to your saved photos in external hard drive until unless it is plugged in.
Snapshot of the guide
There is a quick snapshot of the guide so you can understand quickly how to move the library to external drive.
- Prepare your external hard drive to move Photo Library. Make sure drive is formatted as MacOS Extended Journaled.
- Go to the location of the Photo library and move it to external drive.
- Set the external library as a System Photo Library (So whenever you open the Photos app it will open the photos library from the external hard drive.)
- After completing trasfer to drive, make sure this external drive is connected to your Mac whenever you want to access photos.
Our article will help you to move your photos from Mac to external hard drive. Continue reading the steps are about to start.
Do not worry if you have already stored your photos on iCloud photo library. Our article will help you to get back your already saved photos in iCloud photos library and will help you to move them to external hard drive. Here is how to do it.
System Photo Library vs Other Library
When you run Photos app on your Mac first time this will ask you to create a new or use an old library. That default Photo library became the system library automatically. Only System Photo Library are allowed to access iCloud services.
You can create multiple other libraries and work with photos only in one library at a time. To work in another library you have to switch the library. You can also change and set one of the other libraries as a System library.
How to transfer the Photos library to a hard drive
How To Transfer Photos From Icloud To Mac Photo Library Download
First, make it sure the hard drive you are going to use for Photos library is faster and have enough space. It will save your time and stored your memories quickly. A good hard drive always keeps your stuff secure and there are fewer chances of losing your data.
Before going step by step to move your photo library to external hard, first make it sure that your external hard drive is already formatted for Mac OS Extended (journaled). If it is not formatted for Mac first erase all the data from it and format and choose the option of Mac OS Extended (journaled). Use the Disk Utility on your Mac to erase any hard drive (When you erase any drive in mac everything will be deleted, so please save any important data ).
- Find the Photos Library on your Mac, it will be in your Pictures folder. Click the Go menu on the top and then select Home option from the menu.
- Open the Pictures folder and there you will find the Photos library.
TIP: In order to see how much storage your photos have taken, just Ctrl+Click on the photos library icon and click on Get Info. Now you can make sure that you have enough storage in your external hard drive. - It’s time to copy your Photos Library to your external hard drive using drag and drop trick. Now sit back and wait until copies over. The time of transferring photos depends on the size of your Photo Library.
- When transferred completed, press and hold the Option/Alt key from keyboard and click the Photos app icon from Dock to open it. Keep holding the keyboard key until you see a window otherwise this will open the Photos app.
- You will see a new window to choose the library. On that window hit the button Other library. Navigate to the new location on your external hard drive and choose the Photo Library.
- If there is a message that shows “there are some items that need to be downloaded from iCloud Photo library” then you need to click on delete incomplete items and download all those incomplete items.
Set a photo library as System Photo Library
We have already moved the library to an external drive now its time to set it as System Photo Library. Doing that will allow it to use iCloud service.
- Open the Photo Library from the external drive.
- Click Photos men and then select the Preferences option.
- On the next window click General and then click Use as System Photo Library button (this will help you to get it to work with iCloud Photo Library)
TIP: Remember this is the step you need to perform in future If you accidentally unlinked the external drive’s photo library from the Photos app. - Go to System Preferences then iCloud then Photos then Options, and choose iCloud Photo Library to turn that back on. See if you have stored all the photos here.
Note: you will need to plug in your external hard drive in order to see your photos).
Delete Photo Library from Mac
How To Transfer Photos From Icloud To Mac Photo Library Iphone
Once you have confirmed that all the photos in the library moved to the external drive. You can delete the Photo Library from your Mac computer. Go to the Pictures folder and delete it to free up space from your mac.
How to back up your iCloud Photo Library
Transfer Photos From Icloud To Mac Photos
If you want to move all your photos which you have already backed up to your iCloud photo library to a storage device connected to your Mac. Follow our step by step guide above, but you need to download all the images from iCloud first.
If you have already transferred your Photos library onto the external storage device, now you need to follow these steps.
- Open Photos on your Mac.
- Click Photos then click on Preferences.
- Click on the iCloud tab.
- Choose Download originals to this Mac.
Now all your iCloud photos will be saved on the storage device. (If you are running short of space you would probably not want to do that)
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