iCloud Photos hi-res download failures

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Level 1

8 points

iCloud Photos hi-res download failures

I work 100% within the Apple ecosystem: photos and videos captured on iPhone 11 Pro, Photos synced with iCloud (2TB), MacBook Pro running Catalina with latest iMovie & FCPX for video editing. I have Optimize Storage turned on because my 256GB SSD would overflow if all originals kept on my Mac.

Problem: iCloud Photos properly keeps only thumbnail images of photos and videos. When I double-click on a video in the Photos app to download the full resolution video, about 50% of the time it silently fails. I often have to restart my MacBook to get the photos to download, though sometimes just restarting Photos fixes it. The video files are typically not huge (~50GB), but no matter how long I wait the download never completes.

I don’t *think* I am misunderstanding how this is supposed to work, but maybe I am. In any event, this is a key iCloud feature and should not fail 50% of the time.

What can I do?

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on May 25, 2020 3:45 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

196,923 points

May 26, 2020 6:40 AM in response to kwpapke

How much free storage is on your Mac? The download from iCloud Photos will fail, if your Mac does not have enough free storage to download the full version of the photo or video.

To check the free storage look at the Info for your system volume. There is a line "Available" in the info, followed by "Purgable" in parenthesis. Your free storage is Available minus Purgable. And that should be at least 10GB for the system to be able to work reliably. How much storage is really feee on your Mac and not just "Available"?

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