You can’t break the garden walled easily

The adage “grass is greener on the other side” is common stay in a world filled with options.

I have been a somewhat pro Apple since the time I embraced the Apple eco-system. But I am starting to see the cracks after ~4 years of being inside the walled garden.

iCloud

Hoping through iphones (13pro, 14pro) to 16pro meant that I fast approached the 200gb icloud storage limit on photos I backed along the way.

And as I am stuck with the 16 pro for the next 3 years because of my ATT contract, I am left with 2 options: 1. Upgrade my icloud storage limit to 2TB(@ $9.99/month) from 200GB(@ $2.99/month). 2. Find a way to move my photos to external hard disk.

I chose the second option because it makes more sense from a financial stand point. On top of it, I am trying to be more data/privacy conscious(more on that in a below).

I began my mission to free up icloud and my phone space, starting with turning off the syncing on my iphone. Next was to get all the photos from icloud and iphone onto external hard disk. I am not sure if it was intentional or engineering limitation or plain oversight - but there doesn’t seem to be a way to download all the pictures from the icloud with a single click of a button.

There is a limitation placed on number of pictures you can download which is set at 1000. I have 11000+ photos to download.

It is either poor implementation of the icloud web app or conscious oversight to make it hard to migrate away from icloud.

Through the lens