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Backing up iCloud Photos to an external drive, start to finish
iCloud 照片视频，备份到移动硬盘全攻略
About this video
A fifteen-minute walkthrough of getting a photo library that lives in iCloud onto a drive you own. It works through both routes — pulling the originals down through iCloud Photos in a browser, and letting the Photos app hold the library locally first — then shows what the resulting files look like on disk and how to tell a complete copy from a partial one. Long, methodical, and aimed at someone who has never opened iCloud on the web.
The video is a procedure rather than an argument, so this page describes its shape instead of restating its steps: at fifteen minutes it is long enough that the order matters more than any single step, and a written summary that skipped the order would be worse than watching it.
It opens in iCloud Photos in a browser, which is the route that needs no local storage at all — the originals are pulled down and land in a folder on the drive. From there it moves to the Photos app and what has to be true locally before the library can be copied out intact: the setting that keeps originals rather than optimised versions, and how to confirm the library is complete before unplugging anything.
The middle is the least glamorous and most useful part. A grid of thumbnails tells you nothing about whether a copy is complete, so the video spends its time in a file listing — counts, sizes, and the folder layout the export produces — and compares those against what iCloud reports for the library. That comparison is the whole difference between a backup and a folder that looks like one.
The description carries a single link, to Apple’s data and privacy portal. That is the full-export route: a request for a copy of everything, delivered as an archive, rather than a download through the Photos interface. It is worth knowing the two exist side by side, because they answer different questions — one gives you the files, the other gives you everything Apple holds about you.
If the goal is simply to stop a library from filling the internal disk, the companion video is the shorter path: moving the Photos library to an external drive does that in four minutes, because it moves the library rather than copying photos out of it.
What it covers
- That there is more than one route from iCloud to a local drive, and that they produce different folder structures
- That a download is only a backup once the file count and the total size on disk have been compared with what iCloud reports
- That photos and videos are separate items in iCloud, so a photos-only copy is not a backup of the library
- That the video's own reference is Apple's data and privacy portal, which is where a full export request is filed
Apps in this video
No app page is linked. The video works entirely inside Apple's own software — iCloud Photos, the Photos app and Finder — and no third-party app is its subject, so none is claimed here.