How to turn off Apple Photos in the Cloud without deleting your original photos and videos

Turning off iCloud Photos can be an unnerving experience. This blog post will help you understand what’s involved.

If your intention is to turn off Apple Photos in the Cloud, it’s probably because you discovered how much better and affordable Google Photos is. Once you enable Google Photos on a Business-class G-Suite account, you’ll never want to go back. With unlimited data, lightning fast cloud transfer speeds, support for all your Apple devices and options for backup and data retention, Google Photos makes your Mac devices that much better.

But before you disable Apple Photos in the Cloud, there are some steps you should take to make sure you don’t lose any of your photos and videos. That’s what this blog post is all about. First, some background:

How Apple Photos in the Cloud works (and doesn’t work) and how that affects your photos and videos

Apple had good intentions when they started offering Photos in the Cloud back in 2015. The idea behind it was simple: All your photos available on all your devices automatically. The way it would work is like this: Take a photo on your iPhone, and the photo will sync with iCloud, then any of your other devices, like a Mac or iPad, if signed into iCloud with Photos in the Cloud turned on, would also see the photo.

Conceptually, Apple Photos in the Cloud is great. In reality, it results in a lot of problems, and sometimes it results in photos being deleted by accident where even professional data recovery isn’t possible.

First of all, when you delete a photo from one of your devices, it deletes it from all devices and from iCloud. And Apple has stated that iCloud isn’t a backup, and if you have photos in the cloud turned on, your photos are NOT included in your iPhone’s backup. Apple says it’s your responsibility to back up, but they don’t tell you how to do it.

Backing up Apple Photos in the Cloud is an unbelievably difficult - and slow - process

Next, backing up your Apple Photos in the Cloud is an unbelievably difficult process. You have two choices:

First, you can navigate to iCloud.com, go to your photos, and then select up to 1,000 photos at a time. There is no button to do this, so you literally have to work in a web browser to click, then shift-click, to find a 1,000 photos, and then export them. Then you have to find where you left off, and do it again. Ibid, ad nauseam. Then a bigger problem happens: In my experience, regardless of how powerful my Mac is, or how fast my Internet connection is, each time I download ≤ 1,000 photos, it creates and attempts to download a ZIP file. Over 90% of the time that ZIP file is corrupt, damaged and will not allow me to extract photos.

The other option is to create an entirely new Apple Photos library on your Mac, and then set it up to download all your originals. This too is a royal pain, but primarily because Apple’s iCloud servers are so incredibly slow compared to other cloud services. Today I just completed a 529.66GB iCloud Photos Library download for a customer who I am helping migrate to Google Photos. The photos library I downloaded contained 79,394 Photos and 1,959 videos, and it took over a week and a half on a 1000Mbps download capable Internet connection. And that’s for a relatively average Photos in the Cloud library. Just for comparison, the same download would take about 1 day downloading from Google Photos. Downloading from Apple is painfully slow, but it’s necessary if you want to download and keep all your original photos and videos.

What is the difference between Original and Optimized pictures?

The extremely important thing to remember is that when downloading your photos to a new Photos library, you must make sure you are downloading originals, not optimized copies. Your originals are the size and resolution that your phone or device actually took the photo. Optimized copies are much smaller versions of your photos created by Apple that allows your device to browse through photos faster. The difference between original and optimized can be dramatic:

An original photo taken with an iPhone 11 Pro is 12 megapixel, which means an image resolution 4290 x 2800 that can be printed as big as 36.3cm x 23.7cm (14.30" x 9.34" in inches) at a nice 300dpi, which is photo quality when we look at a physical picture. A print that size is wonderful, because it’s bigger than a standard letter.

An optimized version of the same photo for an iPhone is only 2.7 megapixel, which would maybe print the same photo quality at only 10cm x 15cm (4” x 6” inches). It’s a dramatic reduction in quality. Remember, this is for an image taken with an iPhone 11 Pro. Older phones and cameras may have significantly smaller photos and reduced quality. This is a really good reason to grab the originals from Apple before turning off Photos in the Cloud on your devices.

After you’re done downloading all your original photos and videos

Once your full backup is complete, you can use Google Backup and Sync to upload all of the originals you’ve downloaded to Google Photos. If you’re not using Google Photos, you’ll need to do two things: First, preserve and protect what you’ve downloaded for safe keeping. Second, you’ll need to make sure your Apple devices are big enough to hold all of your originals, then import and save them securely before deleting them using a tool like Image Capture on a Mac. It gets a lot more complicated when you don’t use a cloud service, which is why I am such a big fan of Google Photos with unlimited storage. The last thing any iPhone user wants is to be juggling data on their iPhone, hoping to not run out of space.

There are a couple of concerns I have heard from people trying to move away from Apple’s Photos in the Cloud:

Will I lose photos or videos by turning Photos in the Cloud off?

The answer is No, as long as you have completed a full download of all original photos and videos in Apple’s iCloud. Also, remember that this process is time-sensitive. Once your original photos and videos have been downloaded, you need to turn off Photos in the Cloud on all devices using the same iCloud login. Otherwise, when you take new photos or video following the full original download completion, they may continue to be uploaded to Apple’s Photos in the Cloud, which creates more work to download them and also creates the risk that you may somehow miss them.

Also, I recommend getting your new Google Photos on G-Suite Business set up both on the cloud and on all your devices, especially iPhone, before you switch over. When you have Google Photos installed and set up correctly, it will automatically take every single photo and video and upload it to your Google Photos account.

Follow the steps and process guidelines above, and you’ll never unintentionally lose a single precious memory.

If you are curious about switching away from Apple Photos, feel free to drop me a line. I specialize in helping people switch from Apple Photos to Google Photos, and I provide training online to help you master Google Photos.