alt Hacker NewsThat’s not true. On any Mac or iPhone you can choose the iCloud Photo Library storage option to download all instead of letting the system optimize the storage. And if you turn off iCloud Photo Library, it will also try to download it all. I know this because I stopped using iCloud Photo Library and that was how I got all my photos downloaded.
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Okay, and if there are 300 or 500 GB of photos, how do you synchronise them with your iPhone?
that's good to know. can I then download the photos from iPhone to a backup hard-drive or transfer to a folder in my computer?
Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library - you're in for an endless game of spinners (it does some network IO on the main thread), "not responding" and memory leaks.
But hey at least we've got Liquid (gl)ass now.
+1 to this method. After optimise storage is disabled on the Mac, wait for all photos to download. Then, open the photos library bundle and you'll see every photo there, full res. Copy them wherever you like.
Also, if you leave optimise storage disabled and continue to use Photos, every photo will be cloned in any local or cloud backups of your machine. This strategy creates additional photo redundancy separate from iCloud while still benefiting from library syncing.