Ok, granted this may not be the perfect forum but it's still backup and hopefully someone here is familiar with the apple photo situation. I am running out of storage in the cloud and can easily remove sufficient gb from photos. I know you can download pictures to your pc but I can't work out how to get all of them. Clicking on the folder in explorer once I connect my phone only shows me 28 photos (looks like the last month). I suppose the older ones are all in the cloud - when I access my phone via itunes, click on photos I see "icloud photos is on" and the bar at the bottom shows 713 photos (which sounds right). On the phone I can see these too under "all photos" going back 3 years. What is not clear to me is how to download all of these onto my pc for storage. Looking in explorer under "my photo stream" I can see 216 photos, so I assume these have downloaded somehow already to my harddrive (I guess when I connected via wifi) but how to initiate the other approx 500 photos to follow?
I'm no authority but My Photo Stream is not the same as the iCloud Photo Library. I went "Apple" last fall and never turned on the Photo Stream. It is an older way to share photos that Apple is no longer pushing (at least that's my understanding.) I avoid using iTunes. I only have it for hard backups of my "i devices". Since I only use the iCloud Photo Library, the fastest way I've used to transfer photos is to connect to the online version of iCloud and transfer photos back and forth from there. This is likely not the best way but it's simple and has always worked fine for me. Of course, there's always the old standby. iPhones/iPads connect to computers as cameras. If you use a computer app that grabs photos from cameras, you can always get your photos directly from the device that way. If you delete the photos from the device (after grabbing them), they will also be deleted from the iCloud. I think there are some 3rd party programs that allow easy photo organization in conjunction with iTunes. But as I said, I don't mess with that stuff...
thanks Han - I don't really fancy the idea of using additional programs either. I think I need to study this a bit more to decide which feature to leave active or how to structure the backups.
There is a way to access the photos using iTools from your photo stream when you dig into the file structure. They are cached. I had to do this for a director of a company, but it was about 1.5-2 years ago.
