iCloud Photo users - how many photos have you got stored?

[Livein2025]

I hate being beholden to ICloud for eternity. But it’s darn convenient to know all my photos taken with my iPhone are being saved in the cloud so I don’t lose them in the event of my phone being lost/stolen/broken.

I’d really like to buy a storage device or 2 and back up all my photos so that all my eggs aren’t just in the Apple basket. The trouble is, I have over 40,000 photos in my ICloud. My partner has a similar amount on his ICloud. We also have a Mac computer that has photos taken with our cameras going back over 20 years that we back up regularly and don’t tend to use as much - but I’m leaving that out the equation.

Has anyone else started the gargantuan task of trying to download all their photos from the ICloud? They don’t make it easy to do it on a large scale - it seems impossible to select large numbers of photos. I imagine it would take days to actually download? I keep promising myself I will start the process by going through it year-by-year and delete the out of focus shots and duplicates before downloading but it feels like it’s a full-time job!

Has anyone else tackled this issue? I worry what might happen to my photo archive when I die or can’t afford to pay the storage. Many of the photos are of my kids and it’s their archive too. They might not be interested in it at the moment but it would ve horrible if it disappeared. I do worry about lumbering them with the cost of keeping up the iCloud payments. That’s why I’d like the photos backed up on physical drives as well.

Do you really need 40,000 photos? Why do you think the kids will be interested in 40,000 photos? Have you any idea of the impact on the environment of maintaining iCloud storage?

It really doesn’t take long to delete photos. Maybe don’t take so many in the first place?

Impact on the environment 😂

I have around 9K images and have been taking digital photos since 2000, but I’m quite ruthless in my culling.

I would have thought it's quite hard to find the best images in a library of 40K, which means you probably never see the best images.

I use a combination of smart albums, albums, and the automatic duplication detection within Apple Photos on Mac OS to manage them.

To back them up, select all images (Command + A) and export unmodified originals.

Alternatively, you can simply save the entire library, but ensure that “download originals” is set in preferences and that the download has completed.

I shoot a lot of images as RAW, which I adjust within Apple Photos, so I prefer to keep the library intact.

Just shout if you need more guidance.

You may also like to consider setting your Legacy Contact on your Apple ID so your account can be accessed in the event of your death.

I will need to cull duplicates and out of focus , surplus images. I know there are many, many duplicates - I often sort into folders in order to do photo books - ideally I would delete from the ‘master’ roll once I’ve cherry picked good ones for the folders but it seems if you do that it just completely deletes the photo even from within any subfolders you’ve set up. That’s annoying.

I want to be systematic - the automatic duplication detection sounds useful @Dbank - I’d like any info/tips you can supply on that. I’m sure I’ve tried bulk selecting images before and it’s not been as straightforward as hitting Command A? I’ll have another go though once I’ve culled a good percentage.

The stuff in the ICloud is easy enough to search in Years, Locations, People (bit hit and miss on face recognition but not too bad). The stuff on the Mac, that we just manually back-up is the most cumbersome. It’s an old Mac I’m looking at it on and grindingly slow.

I will set up that legacy thing for my ICloud accounts. I’m sure my children will love to see pictures of themselves when they’re older - if they don’t, they can ditch it all once I’m gone.

Ironically I collect old, found photographs and rephotograph many of them. I really am a glutton for punishment 😂

I-devices have a habit of taking a burst of pictures, in effect a short movie, when you think you’re taking a single shot. You can save a LOT of storage by reducing these to single frames.

But 40,000 pictures is ridiculous. Are you completely indiscriminating about what you keep?

Just a quick suggestion. If you decide to move them to a storage device get some reputable advice on the best device & its probable lifespan. The only reason I mention this is a few years ago I discovered that precious photos I had on a storage device had degraded (sorry can't think of the correct word) and were ruined.
Not all but a lot of them wouldn't open properly, had lines through them or only the top half was viewable.
I was gutted.

I would suggest the following steps assuming you have access to a relatively recent Mac, that is able to run Photos 10.

A) Import and detect duplicates

1. Import all relevant images into the Photos application.
2. Let the application identify any duplicate images. (may take several hours)
3. Observe the duplicates in the Photo application (Utilities > duplicates)
4. Scale the thumbnails to small (Top Mid left)
5. Select and delete the duplicates (drag and lasso to select them)

B) Filter and manually delete images

1. In Photos > Albums create Folders named for each year you have images.
2. Inside each of these folders, create a smart album, with the "Match the Following condition" "Date Captured" - "Is in the Range" "01/01/year to 31/12/year)" where year is title of the folder.
3. Open the oldest Album created in step 2
4. Delete unwanted images (use multi select, lasso and control to select the images)
5. Work your way through the Years.

C) Optionally create New Albums within the Year folders, and move the the images from the smart album

There are many other ways you can make this work flow smarter, but this should get you started.

Perfectly normal. I’ve got 62,000 plus

Glad I’m not the only one jcsc

I love taking photographs - I studied photography at Uni. Since my kids were born I’ve documented their lives - so has my partner - our kids have had digital cameras - year on year it stacks up and once it’s on the ICloud ‘safe’, it’s out of sight out of mind.

My DD is turning 18 so I’m going through all her birthday photos by just searching for her birthday month.

Thanks so much for that de-duping info Dbank - excellent advice.

The embarrassing thing is that I actually have experience of working in digital preservation. Rule number one, is that there’s no point in just backing stuff up if you can’t find anything! And then you’ve got to think about constantly monitoring the media you save it on because media becomes corrupted and/or obsolete.

I'm guilty of storing large quantities of photos too.

I love taking photos and Icloud keep advising that I don't have any storage left and should upgrade to the next package. Resisting that for the time being. I need to delete photos that I made into albums, but it's difficult when you look back at shots and relive the memories!

Some insane responses on this thread. I have 71,000+ photos and I haven’t got time to faff about with historical picture deletion.