I Cloud Photo Download
 

I was wondering if there is any place around that will download my photo's in the I Cloud to an external hard drive? It seems crazy to pay for extra storage when a external drive will do. I currently have a Apple phone and a HP Computer.

How many pictures do you have? They give you 5gb for free, which is enough space for a ton of pictures. If you really want to store them locally though, you can just connect the phone to your PC and browse / backup whatever you want.

When that hard drive dies, you’re out of luck though unless you have some sort of backup solution.

Connect the external hard drive to the HP computer, go to ICloud.com and sign in. Then, you should be able to "drag and drop" the photos to the external drive that will appear in the Windows File Explorer program. But, any computer service technician can do this for you. Another cloud storage option is the Google drive, which every Google account holder has with a free 15gb of storage. Just go to drive.google.com and sign in. Click on "mydrive". Or, you can install the Google drive app.

I have never used ICloud but if this appears like another drive on your computer you should be able to highlight all of the pictures and go to your external drive and paste then all of the pictures should get copied from the ICloud to your local drive. You should be able to do this in File Explorer (I am assuming you are using Windows on the HP).

Just sign into your iCloud account, select all the photos and download them to whatever hard drive you have connected to your computer.

If you're running out of space in your iCloud account, you certainly have more stored there, than will fit on your iPhone.

Not exactly. Apparently, the ICloud free storage is only 5gb, but most IPhones have way more storage than that. Most have at least 128gb, 256gb, or more.

Connect iPhone to your PC, and download the photos to your computer, or to an external hard drive connected to your hard drive.

Import photos and videos from an iPhone to PC - Microsoft Support

If you have a Shutterfly account and place occasional orders you can backup all of your photos to their site for no charge

Just plug into your HP computer, tell your iPhone you trust it, and download everything. Choose the few you want to keep available on the phone, and delete the rest. If you can follow microwave cooking directions you can download your photos. The task does not require a degree in rocket science.

I have lots of family photos, going back to the 1860s. I’ve digitized all of them. They are all in the cloud. They are on several memory chips and other places. A lot of them are on Ancestry. But technology changes. There were computer programs I used thirty years ago that I can no longer use. There are new iPhones where the photos take up as much as 48k each. The Cloud is simply giant buildings filled with computer servers. What happens when they are no longer profitable? Will they be shut down? They cost an enormous amount to build and run. What if a virus destroys them. What if you leave photos in some format for your kids or grandkids, but they don’t have the technology to see them and don’t know what they are? You put 10,000 photos on some little chip, they find it when you die, don’t know what it is, and just throw it away.

One good thing to do is to go through all your photos on your phone and trash all of them that aren’t terrific. You know, you take a hundred at some birthday party, but keeping one would really be enough. You have five hundred of your dog, but a dozen of the very best would be enough. You took a thousand photos of your flowers, but your grandchildren won’t want to look at them, ever. Get rid of them now, so everything doesn’t get tossed.

Also, for all of these photos, figure out how to put names and dates on each of them. I know Apple lets you do this. I assume the other brands do, too. It takes a long time, but I assure you, if your kids don’t know who great-aunt whoever is, if you are gone, they will never know. That person will be lost and forgotten.

I have a 1TB external hard drive from Staples that I back up all my files onto. Prefer to have sole control over my files rather than trust the supposedly secure cloud. And I’ll always have access even if the servers go down. No worries about losing my files if my laptop gets hacked

A lot of bad information here. Freehiker does have some good info though. If you have an Apple question, you will get better answers if you post questions on the villages Apple club site.
None of the people here asked how you got your photos to iCloud in the 1st place. Nobody just drags photos to iCloud, you normally setup your Apple device to automatically move your photos/videos to iCloud and if you don’t modify this setting, all your future photos will go to iCloud and you will be in the same boat in the future as you are now.
Sure, you can change your device settings to not move your photos to iCloud, then move all your photos to your computer. (Again, wrong info posted here. You don’t drag your photos to your computer). When you modify the sync photos into iCloud to not sync, you will be prompted if you want Apple to move these photos to your computer or just delete them off iCloud. Let Apple do the move. Before you do, move your photos library to the hard drive you want to use then Apple will move your photos from iCloud to your library.

Once you do this, make sure your computer and phone/ipad are all backed up regularly because if the hard drive/ssd fails. Your photos are gone. Most people don’t backup all their devices.

There are many sites that you can store your photos on, but some of them will cost you each month, some sites might not be secure, or you might have to do a manual process of getting your photos to this destination.

If you were using a Mac, there are many reasons to get the next storage tier in cloud for .99 cents a month: private relay and hide email, and a place to backup all your iPhones and iPads automatically. Windows, you’re on your own, I never use windows, just Apple or Linux.

Simple download
 

I used to connect my iPhone to my computer and download the pictures I wanted BUT then I noticed that some of them were in very small format once downloaded and you could barely see them. I did a little research and found that the phone compressed some photos "to save space". I got my iCloud account squared away and now I download the pictures from there. You can select one picture and hit the download icon (looks like a cloud with a down arrow) and a single picture is downloaded. You can select more than one picture, hit the download icon and the files are downloaded as a zip file which you can then treat as another folder on your computer.

How Important are your photo's to you?
 

Old Disaster Recovery guy here. I recommend three copies of your important photo's, documents, etc. One copy on your home computer, one copy by your home computer (thumb drive, remote hard drive, etc.) and one copy off site. Work with copy on your computer and use external drive copy by your computer as a recovery copy in the event the computer copy fails (hardware issue, user error - mistakenly delete file or photo). Use the offsite copy as a recovery copy in the event both the computer copy and the external drive copy fail (house fire). Do regular backups to all the drives. I would keep at the last the three backups. Hope it helps.

It’s 99 cents a month for 50gb, it’s worth keeping