Apple makes it sound easy: Go to iCloud.com and log in with your Apple ID.Once you’re logged in, you can select the photos or videos you want to download and choose the download option.

Apple conveniently omits to tell you that you can download a maximum of 1,000 photos and videos at a time. And that these download in a zip file. So you need to do 40 separate exports, manually tracking what’s transferred and what remains. Then you unzip and merge all 40 folders and end up with a rather large folder containing 40,000 photos. No organization, no albums…a complete mess.

Photos Takeout Does It Better

Photos Takeout, available on the Mac App Store, can download those 40,000 photos and videos from iCloud in one shot. With just a few clicks. In folders organized by years or albums. Preserving full resolution, metadata and image formats. Painlessly and fast.

What is Photos Takeout?

Photos Takeout is the essential macOS app for exporting your iCloud and Mac Photos library. Popular with hundreds of professional photographers and photo organizers, it gives you complete control of the photos and videos saved in your Apple Photos library. It provides an intuitive, easy way to effortlessly download and back up your Mac and iCloud Photos library into organized, accessible folders.

If you are frustrated by the limitations of Apple’s native Photos app exports, just remember that Photos is designed to keep photos IN, while Photos Takeout is designed to get them OUT.

How is it better than exporting with Apple Photos?

• Customizable Exports: Export all or selected photos and videos by year, album, or date, creating a familiar and intuitive folder structure.
• Preserve Quality & Metadata: Maintain original image resolution, vital EXIF/IPTC metadata, titles, descriptions, keywords, and locations.
• Full iCloud Access: Fetches full-resolution versions from iCloud when “Optimize Mac Storage” is enabled. No “1000 photos at a time” limitation.
• Incremental Exports: Keep your exported folders up-to-date by exporting only new or modified files, saving time and storage.
• Comprehensive Format Support: Handles all photo & video formats, including Live Photos (exported as JPG + MOV).
• Maintain Organization: Preserve your custom arrangements within albums and mirror complex folder-album hierarchies.
• Broad Compatibility: Compatible with all macOS and Apple Photos versions from High Sierra to Sequoia. Runs seamlessly on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

Why Can Apple Photos Be So Good?

Unlike the rudimentary export function of the native Photos app, which lumps all your files into a single, jumbled up folder and can discard crucial metadata, Photos Takeout ensures your memories are exported perfectly.

• True Offline Backup: iCloud is a syncing service, not a backup. Photos Takeout create a real, accessible offline backup of your entire library in an organized format.
• Reduce iCloud Storage Costs: Easily offload photos and videos from iCloud while retaining a fully accessible copy on your Mac or external drive.
• Seamless Migration: Extract your image assets for migration to other photo management programs without losing organization, edits, or metadata.
• Effortless Management: Find your exported library in neat, well-structured folders for easy browsing and management.

Photos Takeout simplifies complex tasks, empowering you to manage even multi-terabyte libraries with just a few clicks. Download the free version today to experience the fastest, most reliable way to secure and organize your digital memories.

Where to Find Out More?

Visit our website for a detailed user guide and personalized support: www.photostakeout.com.

Download the free evaluation version on the Mac App Store.

PS: If you are downloading photos to reduce iCloud storage, PhotoSort is a nifty little app that sorts the Photos library by file size and aesthetic quality. These are two more things that the Photos app doesn’t do. Sorting thus can help identify the biggest space hogs in your library, and also poor quality pictures, random screenshots, pictures and memes saved from the internet etc. that you may want to delete.

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In Photos on Mac, you can use smart albums to find such photos – by creating a smart album with the condition ‘Album – Is Not – Any’. However, iOS doesn’t support smart albums. So we have to find some other way to do it.

Good news: This ability is available in iOS 18.4 and later.

Here’s how to find photos that are not in any album:

1. Open Photos on your iPhone or iPad.
   
2. Make sure you are in the Library view, which shows all your photos.
   
3. Swipe the screen slightly up or down. A little menu appears at the bottom.
   
4. Tap the round button on the left – it’s the one with up and down arrows.
   
5. Select Filter, and then ‘Not in any Album’. Done!

The little menu shown above appears at the bottom of the screen. Tap it and select Filter:

Select Not in an Album.

Next: How to sort the Mac / iCloud Photos library by file size?

Easy. With the macOS app PhotoSort.

Find a more detailed description here.

The post Find Photos That Aren’t In Any Album on iPhone/iPad appeared first on Photos Takeout.

A Shared Album is different from a Shared Library. This article focuses on the former. You can read about the Shared Library feature here.

Creating Shared Albums

Creating these is easy. For step-by-step guidance, read this this tutorial from Apple.

A Few Things to Know

Apple hosts your Shared Albums. As such, photos and videos in these do not count against your iCloud storage. Since these don’t use your iCloud space, they aren’t visible in your iCloud.com/Photos account. You can only see them in the Photos app on Mac, PC or iOS devices.

By default, photos that others add to your albums occupy minimal space on your device: Photos app creates their small and thumbnail-sized versions for local storage. Only if you download others’ photos to your local library, they’ll occupy space equal to their file size.

Users need to connect to the internet when first syncing such albums to their devices. After generation of the smaller versions, users can see them without being online.

The following limitations apply to Shared Albums (Not bad for a free feature?):

• Maximum number of photos and videos per album: 5000
• Maximum number of photos per contributor, per hour: 1000
• Maximum number of photos per contributor, per day: 10,000
• Maximum albums you can own: 200
• Maximum albums you can subscribe to: 200
• Maximum subscribers per shared album: 100

Shared Albums Aren’t A Backup

Shared Albums store photos at lower resolution: Photos larger than 2048 pixels along the longer edge reduce to 2048 pixels (except panoramic shots, which can be up to 5,400 pixels wide) and videos to 720p. More on these and file formats supported here.

Apple strips captions, titles and keywords from the copies saved in Shared Albums. Creation dates and locations, are, however, retained.

Because of the above reasons, you should not think of iCloud Shared Albums as a backup.

After adding photos to a Shared Album if you delete them from your Photos app, they get deleted from your iCloud Photo Library and all linked devices. However, they still remain intact in the Shared Album.

If the creator / owner of a Shared Album deletes the album, all subscribers lose access to it. As such, for assured access to Shared Albums’ photos, you must download them to your Photos library or computer.

Downloading Shared Albums

If it’s a small album or you only need to download a few photos, this is easily done with the Photos app’s Export feature. Open the shared album, select photos, then click File > Export in the top menu.

With this method you can download up to 1,000 photos at a time. Since a shared album can have 5,000 photos and videos, you may have to do up to five separate exports per album.

If you need to export large shared albums or several albums at a time, it’s easier with Photos Takeout app: Click open Albums and scroll down. Select the shared albums you want, and click Export:

If you have a lot of albums, switch to the List View:

Check out our other blog posts on Apple Photos. For a deeper dive into the inner workings of the Mac Photos library, read this article.

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