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How do I download photos from iCloud Photos directly to my External HD? I have no more storage on my mac.

How do I download photos from iCloud Photos directly to my External HD? I do not have storage room on my macbook.


MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 11, 2023 12:55 PM

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Posted on Jul 11, 2023 1:14 PM

If you are using an internet browser to download photos as described in the "Download copies of your photos and videos from iCloud.com" section of Archive or make copies of the information you store in iCloud - Apple Support set the Download folder of the browser to your external drive before you start.


How you do that varies by browser. If you are using Safari, go to Safari Preferences > General (at the top of the Preferences window) > File download location.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 11, 2023 1:14 PM in response to Sapokni

If you are using an internet browser to download photos as described in the "Download copies of your photos and videos from iCloud.com" section of Archive or make copies of the information you store in iCloud - Apple Support set the Download folder of the browser to your external drive before you start.


How you do that varies by browser. If you are using Safari, go to Safari Preferences > General (at the top of the Preferences window) > File download location.

Jul 11, 2023 6:21 PM in response to Sapokni

See this thread Cloud and Hard Drive - Apple Community

Photos can’t be transferred directly from iCloud to an external hard drive for that you need to set up iCloud photo library see the article Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple 

And its preferences Change preferences in Photos on Mac - Apple  open finder > Go > home > your user name > pictures either drag and drop Photos Library.photoslibrary to an external hard drive , the second method is right click on Photos Library.photoslibrary and click on show package contents in the upcoming column , you can also drag and drop complete masters folder to an external hard drive that is connected .

Also as per the article Back up the library in Photos on Mac - Apple 

Manually copy your library to an external storage device: Drag the Photos library (by default in the Pictures folder on your Mac) to your storage device to create a copy.See this article also

Photos library - Move your Library to an external storage device


Jul 11, 2023 5:45 PM in response to FoxFifth

Thank you! I was able to download directly to ext. hd using Safari and icloud photos from web. However, the data moved with each photo reflects today's date as created & modified. This will not work in order to locate & sort by original dates once onto my ext.hd. I had earlier tried to download just a few to my macbook and it did the same thing. Apple support says they must be "exported using Raw unmodified" but that does NOT preserve the original dates either. Any ideas as to how to preserve the photo dates/info whenever downloading and or exporting?

How do I download photos from iCloud Photos directly to my External HD? I have no more storage on my mac.

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