How to use iCloud correctly?

[Russ Smith]

I'm trying to copy all the pictures and videos off Lucy's iphone to an external HD. It's 2TB so I have enough space but doing it by connecting the HD to the phone is very time consuming and the way the phone orders things you end up copying 100 files and then you find out half of them are duplicates they're already on the hard drive. So I looked on youtube and everyone is saying to use iCloud to do it. I logged in to her account on the app but the app doesn't have the same functions as the video. So then I went to icloud.com and logged in there. First off there's 1000 more videos there than on her phone, and more pictures. Don't ask why but she wants a copy of all of them on the hard drive in addition to being in iCloud.

So I did a test, copied 60 videos, the way it works is it creates a folder on your laptop(windows) called icloudphotos.zip, and then it downloads the 60 files to that folder. then you open the folder and copy them over to the HD. Great, works perfect. So then I go to delete the 60 files from the folder on the laptop because I don't want to end up with thousands of videos and pictures on the laptop. I can't even delete one of the files! I tried 60 first hung the program. Then on try 4 I just tried to delete 1 file, again hung the program. The only thing I found I could do was delete the entire folder that it created.

Apparently there's a limit of 1000 files at a time so I can't just say select all and download them all.

Is there a better way? I keep finding claims online that you can tell it to download directly to the HD just change the path, but there's no option to do that in the app, and on icloud.com again no such option it automatically creates this folder on your laptop it doesn't allow you to tell it create that folder on the external HD instead.

Near as I can tell I have copies of over 3000 of the videos, I need to copy 2000 more but doing it phone connected to HD is so clunky I don't want to do that, I do it several hundred at a time and I always then find out a bunch of them are already there, the order on the phone is never the same twice. You also can't do select all and download because when you click on select all, it hangs the phone because it's just too many files it can't handle it. So you have to do it incrementally. I have a 2TB external HD so I have plenty of space but I can't find a way that works. I don't want to download 1000 videos to my laptop and then find out I can't delete them and this time I can't delete the folder. It appears to be the sheer size of videos that's the problem they're big enough that they hang the computer so it can't delete them unless you do the whole folder and I'm afraid with more files it won't let me delete the folder.

 

[Russ Smith]

Forgot to add. the other big issue with HD directly to the phone is that it's not really downloading from the phone it's downloading from iCloud so if you have videos or pictures that she has deleted from her phone, they are still in iCloud so when you go to copy them to the external HD, it downloads them to the phone, and then copies them over to the HD. So you end up reinstalling pictures and videos you already deleted to make space.

I think iCloud is the right way to do it but the not being able to delete files bugs me because it tells me something is wrong.

 

[puckhead]

I'm not an iPhone guy, and they usually run things their own "Apple" way most of the time. That said, they do usually try to keep it fairly simple so I'm guessing it's the size of the data that's giving you headaches.

This came up on a search and if it doesn't help you, I'd clear some time and reach out to their online support so you can explain everything.

Archive or make copies of the information you store in iCloud

Learn how to archive or make copies of the information that you use with iCloud.

support.apple.com

 

[dreamcastrocks]

No better way that I have found. If you purchase the iCloud photos packages that they have and make sure syncing is turned on, that's the best way to go. I had to do that for an iPad that broke recently because I went over 50GB of space in my iCloud.