How to BACKUP iCLOUD PHOTOS! Options for your Mac, iPhone and iPad! Cloud or No Cloud!

Hi Joel - thanks for the video. Is your photo library hard drive always plugged into your laptop? What happens if you open Apple Photos and it’s not plugged in?

I am considering getting a MacBook Air with a 1TB storage so I can keep all the original photos there. Use Time Machine with a separate external drive for backup. What do you think?

I'm not 100% sure but I think if you turn iCloud Photos sync OFF and backup your phone, it will backup your Photos to iCloud. However, I think the problem is that you need to have enough storage (the physical capacity that you buy it with) on your iPhone to store all of the Photos. It's a good option if your Photos library is relatively small and you don't want to pay extra for an third party/external solution.

J

I want to take a large chunk of my photos and videos off iCloud Photos and onto an external SSD. I’m reaching my iCloud storage limit and don’t want to pay for more. Is there any way to view those photos stored on the SSD in the photos app or on iPhoto on a Mac?

Is there a hard drive that saves the meta data from apple photos? E.g tags, quality etc.
I was told external hard drives or other could services (that are not apple) don’t save the quality or full data from the photos/videos?

Five years worth of knowledge in 14 minutes? i’m no Joe Biden, but could you repeat that please?🙉

I am sorry, but as far as I can tell this video did NOT answer a simple question! How do is download ALL of the photos on iCloud to a local external drive! I am NOT interested in saving the library! I want to save the individual photos to the external drive. How about a SIMPLE straightforward step by step procedure. [And stop adding so much irrelevant information! Drives me crazy!]

Does it keep the Live Photos that you have?

Hello Joel, regards from Argentina... I have an iPad Pro M1 and external SSD, how can I backup my entire Photo Library to an External SSD. I want to start using my iPad Pro as my main device (no Mac). My entire Photo Library (400 GB) is downloaded on my iPad Pro. Look forward to your help. Thank you!.

Hi. As we know when I delete a photo from iCloud and/or from Macbook/Iphone it will disappear from iCloud/device (sync). But let's say I have hard drive failure and I must recover or install fresh MacOS (I was logged in Apple ID on the old drive). I'll log in into my Apple ID on the new system (new drive) and what then? All photos will be recovered from iCloud? Nothing will be lost/deleted?

Thanks for the info. As I have all the gear and no idea this really helped me picking my next step going forward on storage. In the past I would normally just buy multiple software/hardware etc but now I'm trying to work smarter glad I seen this vid.

I have search the web high and low for for a video that will tell me how to back up my photos that are on iCloud onto my external hard drive you kind of talk about it a little bit in this video but you get off topic with the sound desk thing is there any video you could recommend that tells me how I exactly to download my iCloud photos onto my external hard drive everybody who has a video on this doesn’t actually show how are you get your photos from the iCloud onto the external hard drive I am so confused and my whole life sucks now

Mate, I am a computer idiot and your vids are great.

Hi Joel, I'm trying to back up my photos on iCloud to an external hard drive (I'm on a Windows PC). However, when I go to my iCloud account and I attempt to download a photo, there's no way to select my external drive (or anywhere else) as the download destination--the photo just downloads. How do I select my external hard drive? Also, how do I select all photos in iCloud? It seems I can only select individual photos for download. Thanks for any help you can offer. Please point me to one of your videos if you've covered these topics.

That was awesome, thanks!

Can you please make a video about how to transfer Google photos to iCloud I’m paying for both service right now I see no point of doing it .or should I use both service .

Hi Joel; great video but I'm still stumped. My wife has iMac / iPad / iPhone and iCloud enabled on all those devices. She mentioned that not all her photo's are showing across all devices. When I go into her iMac -> iCloud, I notice that "iCloud Photo Library" is not checked. If I check that box, it then says to open Photo's but that's where I get a bit lost - can you help? cheers

How to back up 22,000 photos to external hard drive without a computer? Sandisk can’t handle it. Great videos. Thx.

Amazing explanation!!!

Great teaching video! Although all of them have privacy issues I’m especially leery about anything Google and storing photos etc on their devices. Is LaCie as good as Time Machine? Or is that apples to oranges? Ty again and I’m now a new sub.

Hi Joel
Received ixpand and have transferred most photos from iPhone. Easier than expected! Took some time and I had to recharge my phone a couple of times. Just to be safe I closed the app and shut down phone before removing drive. It continued where it left off when I plugged it back in.
Reading the instructions regarding transferring photos to Mac book says photos will show in the camera roll.
? My goal is to import the m into the photo program while keeping the original date and data.
Is that possible?
I vaguely remember camera roll but don’t use it as far as I know
I don’t want to create a mess, so I thought I should get your advice before proceeding.

Love the Sandisk ixpand drive you linked in your description Thank you

HiJoel
Thanks again
I tried the link to Sandusky support article, it took me to a forum.
Maybe I missed something, is there a more direct link to an article or instructions for using the ixpand? Just ordered through your link to amazon!

I've been using Apple products throughout many many years and I'm amazed at the capacity that Joel has to explain and give excellent contento. Keep up the great work

Does the sandisk ixpand drive also back up files from the files app? What about procreate files? Can they be saved?

Hi Joel, really informative videos you have. So I have a scenario - I have my iPhone which shows I have 14,500 in my recent which I assume is a combination of video and images, however on my iCloud it only shows 12,000 plus. On my iPhone it also shows I've used 7GBs of storage out of the 64BGs on the iPhone. however I don't know how I can access those.
On my Mac, I do not have iCloud, turned on, as I didn't want to have all the images on the Mac, as the Macs have limited storage. (maybe a lack of knowledge on my behalf)
I am now at a point where I want to download all the images from my iCloud and iPhone, and then delete them from the iCloud and phone - clearing this space - my method for iCloud has been going to iCloud - selecting 1000 images at a time and saving it to the external 1TB hard drive which works fine...... but..... this does not appear to hold the image data - i.e the time, date, location the photo was taken... and only shows the date and time the images were downloaded. am I missing a step or just not understanding iCloud. please could you help me understand.

Thanks for the video! Do you know, if I have backed up into google photos and iCloud.. if I go to “download” them both to the sandisk drive will it notice that there are duplicates and not put them both on the external drive? I hope that makes sense. Thanks in advance!

watching this video is waste of time, no really tip how to take back up from icloud

You are awesome!!! Please keep explaining things like this, you make it so easily to understand, is like if you get into my mind and answer all those confusion things and questions I got.

I've been looking for an explanation like this for almost 1 week and your are the best one!!! Please keep making this videos!

Greetings

@learn with Joel feld
Hi Joel , I got a new iPhone but I don’t want to synchronize the photos from the old phone which was synced to iCloud , so what I did was using the “photos” app on my MacBook and drag and drop it from there to an external hard drive. I want to sync only the new phones photos I’ll be taking to synchronize with iCloud
My question is : is that what I did correct and all my photos drag and drop th the external are highest quality ?
My 2nd question is I also dragged and dropped the photo library “app” from my MacBook to another external hard drive too .
Thanks a lot .
I also subscribed to your channel as it’s pretty easy to understand and follow .
🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

Man I need your help I have ( unavailable iPhone) I want do backup my photos before I restore my phone, how ? 😭

Wonderful video. I am a senior and very slow to learn these things. If I am listening correctly, If i have my library on an external hard drive and sync the hard drive to the cloud, then the pictures I take-on my I phone will automatically sync with the eternal hard drive when that hard drive is available . Also if I delete a photo on my i phone then it will be deleted on the external hard drive. I should not worry about an accidental delete since I am also using time machine and when I realize the photo is gone I should be able to recover it from time machine. Please advise me if I am correctly understanding you. Thank you and God bless.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge. If I add all my photos to Scan Disk will I then be able to free up storage space on my phone without having to purchase more from Apple?

AT&T have an app AT&T Photos Storage backup what do you know about it?

🙏Hi! If my old iphone photos are stored in icloud rather than the phone itself, will it still be able to extract them without necessarily downloading them back onto my phone?

Is it easy to only download photos rather than all the junk on my phone?

Does it take long? My battery is super weak. I can maybe get an hour out of it to transfer the photos before it dies, and since I have to use my CHARGER PORT as the transfer port...its a race against time. So... if the transferring gets interrupted by my phone dying, is it easy to figure out where I need to resume transferring or will it try to make me start ALL OVER?

This is SUPER important to me because the years to the last days of me and my best friend 🐶 together are on here. I can't even upload these memories onto shutterfly because the photos are on icloud. There's no storage space, home button is busted, and the battery is shot.

I can’t turn on “download all original photos” at the iCoud preferences in Photos. It just wants me to buy a subscription to more iCloud storage. I want my Photos Library on an external HD to just include everything. Any suggestions? Is there also a way to efficiently download and empty all of my iCloud storage? Thanks 🙏

Apple + Photos is maddening. In fact, I once had an Apple genius on the phone due to a photo problem. I asked him if I have all my photos on iPhoto (iCloud Photos back in the day) are they also stored on my computer? He did not know the answer. In years past, I used Time Machine. Never had to use it to restore anything, but I had it connected to my iMac. But since I used iCloud photos, & had optimize my photos selected, it was not backing up photos, because there no photos actually on my iMac to back up. Is that correct? So if I am living in the cloud, using iCloud photos & iCloud Drive, Time Machine is not backing up any of that. Is that correct?

Thanks!

Thank you so much for this excellent video! I just subscribed to your channel now :)

Hi Joel.... just learning from you on this awesome video info you did here.... I have come up with a question...so if I back up contacts from my iphone on that handy little sandisk stick you show in this video then can I use that backup to put it in my new phone.?

External hard drive is 10 times more likely to fail than you’re friend deleting your photos and you noticing in 30 days lol Great video but I think for most ppl if only they had their iCloud stuff figured out would be close to ideal solution.

You’re friend deleted pictures and you didn’t know they had your phone and didn’t know they were deleting photos and suddenly you found out about it in 30 days….. 😮😅

Hi Joel, I am just starting to learn to consolidate and back-up all devices, specially their Photos content. I am trying to create a workflow for this process so that any member of my family will be able to continue this when I'm gone. I am so glad I stumbled on your video. Among all the questions and ideas that pop up, the pressing for right now is How often would you change your Time Machine and other physical drives as it does have a finite number of years of usefulness? Thanks!

I noticed that my iPhone 7s is not backing up very large video files ( greater than 3 mins) to iCloud. These files are from my dash cam.

Your content is GREAT. Awesome job. Keep it up. I am an engineer and Apple makes me feel stupid with all these options and marketing trickery. Thanks!

Hey Joel, thanks for the explanation. Just what I needed to know.

I wanted to ask one thing though, and maybe you know: if I download 100 originals in my iCloud Photo Library to my Mac, I backup to Time Machine, then I remove the 100 original’s downloads, and backup again, will it keep or remove those 100 originals?

Because if it keeps them, that might be a way to get all my originals backed up on a smaller internal HD?

So once you uploaded all your pictures and videos from your phone onto the Sandisk drive can you plug that into your PC and copy everything to an external hard drive using the USB-C port?

So if I purchase a San disk external hard drive I can use it to copy my photos and then can I transfer them to PC or external hard drive?

Hey Joel, A BIG Thank you for your explanatory Videos. I am a new subscriber :) I appreciate this is one of your old videos but I have a question relating to this and possibly something you have Covered (but dont know where it is)!! would you clarify something first. 1. if you delete a photo from iCloud it deletes from everywhere except your TimeMachine back up right ?
Secondly (This could be a video idea!! for you?) 2. I have 1 macbook, just me as a user on it (therefore just my iCloud is visible) can I get my wife logged onto the mac say as another user?. and have her icloud folder visible in the finder for both accounts? with a view to doing the same with her photos: iCloud - external back up + timemachined backed up.

Thank you Joel. 1 question, if I put my photo album in external hard drive because I want to free up the space from my Mac, how would my time machine serve as an additional back up as it won't be able to save it from the external hard drive right?