Download Original iCloud Photos to Your Mac

Whether you're building a real backup, preparing an export to another service, or leaving iCloud Photos altogether, the first step is identical: get full-resolution originals of everything onto your Mac. One radio button does it — the work is in checking you have the disk space, knowing how to watch progress, and verifying it actually finished.

Step 0: will it fit?

Your Mac is about to store the entire library at full resolution. Compare two numbers first:

1. Library size in iCloud: System Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage — read the Photos line. That number is what's about to land on your disk.
2. Free disk space: System Settings → General → Storage. You want the Photos figure plus comfortable headroom — a Mac past roughly 90% full gets slow and cranky.

If it won't fit, free up disk first or move the Photos library to an external drive (see the linked guide below) — don't start a download that will wedge against a full disk.

Flip the switch

1. Open Photos and press ⌘, for Settings.
2. Click the iCloud tab and confirm iCloud Photos is on.
3. Select Download Originals to this Mac (replacing Optimize Mac Storage).

Photos immediately begins pulling every missing original. The change is reversible at any time — selecting Optimize again lets the Mac shed local copies later — so nothing here is a one-way door.

Watch progress (and help it along)

Open the Library view and scroll to the very bottom: a status line reports the download — "Downloading 12,483 items" with a progress indicator, updating as it works. A big library takes hours to days depending on connection. Three things keep it moving:

• Keep the Mac awake and on power. Downloads continue in the background, but sleep pauses everything.
• Leave Photos open when convenient — it's a useful signal that work should continue, and the status line only updates while it's running.
• Don't fight the disk. If free space runs out mid-download, Photos stalls; clear space and it resumes.

Done means the status line goes quiet with no "downloading" remaining. Spot-check by opening a few old videos — they should play instantly with no loading spinner, and no cloud badge in the corner of thumbnails. For a harder verification, measure the library itself from Terminal and compare it against the Photos figure iCloud reported:

# size of the local Photos library (read-only check, changes nothing)
du -sh ~/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary

The local number should land in the same neighbourhood as the iCloud one — modestly larger is normal, since the library includes thumbnails and databases on top of the originals.

If the goal is a portable copy: export unmodified originals

Originals inside Photos Library.photoslibrary are yours, but locked in Photos' internal structure. For a copy that any tool can read:

1. In Photos, select photos — or press ⌘A in the Library view for everything.
2. Choose File → Export → Export Unmodified Original.
3. Pick a destination folder — an external drive is the natural choice.

Unmodified Original exports the exact file the camera produced, with an XMP sidecar option for edits and metadata. The plain Export option instead bakes your edits into new files — use that when you want the edited versions. Either way, the export is a copy: your library and iCloud are untouched.

The disk-space follow-up

Full originals plus headroom is a big ask of a laptop SSD. If it pinched, the clean fix is moving the whole library to an external drive — here's the safe procedure, including how to keep iCloud Photos working from the new location.