How to download all iCloud Photos?

There's nothing wrong with answering Mac Jim ID's questions. You're the one who came here looking for help, after all. And by the way, nobody here cares about your rating of Apple's services, and I for one can't figure out why you would tell us.

Most of us here have never downloaded pictures from iCloud in this way, since most of us have Macs, and our entire Libraries are kept on our computers. It's interesting, and I wish I had thought of it as a backup system to suggest to people. (Well, in light of your experience, maybe not.)

I doubt very seriously that the download cares about "folders" and albums. It purports to download all your Photos data, though it doesn't say in what form. I would think that your data would not include edited pictures, since edited pictures are not stored at iCloud. I would also guess that the images will have crazy looking filenames that will be hard to interpret.

I'd really like to try this out just to see what happens, but I'll have to set up another computer to do it--I fear it will take a long time…

Go_West wrote: … I don't think there's any other way to make an actual backup of your data. When I try to copy paste everything, iCloud tells me I need enough space for everything on the C drive. And I don't have like one terabyte free.

It's hard for me to say much about what you can do in Windows, but on a Mac in Safari we can set the default download location, and that can be on an external drive.

Are you planning to download original files or the edited versions?

• How much iCloud storage are you paying for?
• How much Photos storage do you have showing at Settings > [name on top] > iCloud > Manage Account Storage > Photos?

Question: If you "have about one terabyte worth of pictures on iCloud", why did you think the file size of a download "should be like 250[Gb]"?