MBP & MBA taking Forever to download Photos ( originals )

[harleymhs]

Hey Guys. I am trying to download my "original" ( not optimized ) to my M1 Air and My MBP .. Seems like it will take a week to download 10,000 pics? This doesn't seem normal. I check my internet speed and its over 165 MPS .. Any thoughts.. thanks!!!

 

[Apple_Robert]

Is this from iCloud? It should take less than a day, even at your speed. Do you have a VPN running? If so, turn it off and see how it goes.

Go to Speedtest.net and take the speed test.

 

[imp3rator]

Unfortunately it is normal. iCloud never download at your maximum speed neither at half speed. I have downloaded about 8000 photos in a weekend, but sometimes it was stucked - i tried to invoke download by scrolling up and down through gallery... iCloud Photos are slow. And you don't want to imagine how it works with 100-200GB image gallery...

 

[Apple_Robert]

Unfortunately it is normal. iCloud never download at your maximum speed neither at half speed. I have downloaded about 8000 photos in a weekend, but sometimes it was stucked - i tried to invoke download by scrolling up and down through gallery... iCloud Photos are slow. And you don't want to imagine how it works with 100-200GB image gallery...

Does iCloud use different servers for photos? I just downloaded my entire iCloud account (28GB) and it took less than 30 minutes.

 

[harleymhs]

Is this from iCloud? It should take less than a day, even at your speed. Do you have a VPN running? If so, turn it off and see how it goes.

Go to Speedtest.net and take the speed test.

No VPM running Speedtest.net 163MPS

 

[Apple_Robert]

No VPM running Speedtest.net 163MPS

Must be a iCloud server side problem. Maybe it will speed up and won't take you a week to get the files.

 

[harleymhs]

Let it run all last night, woke up this am and it was 1/4 way done.. Then I paused it and restarted again and now its moving a bit faster up to 3/4 now.. It should finish in about an hour or so.. Must of got stuck ... Last night... ALl seems ok now.. thank you once again for all your replies!!!

 

[jdtimer]

Don't know what is going on with the notoriously slow photo download from iCloud to my PC. I have a good Internet connection and it just sits there doing nothing....!!! downloads a couple of photos and then sits there again.. What is this???? Other iCloud content download is fine but not the photos. I've tried all the stop/start stop/start stuff, there is no problem from my end, appears to be dial up modem speed from iCloud !! Insanely slow Apple ! can you sort this out please. It is unacceptable.

 

[jeff282]

I was having this same issue on both a new MacBook Air and 14 MBP, I was able to trick it to get going, highlighted all photos (Cmd+A) and left click, play slideshow, a prompt comes up that says downloading items for creating slideshow and it plows through them fairly quick.

 

[amuller]

I was having this same issue on both a new MacBook Air and 14 MBP, I was able to trick it to get going, highlighted all photos (Cmd+A) and left click, play slideshow, a prompt comes up that says downloading items for creating slideshow and it plows through them fairly quick.

GM - Thank you Jeff - this made the trick - Thanks for sharing!

 

[q3bing]

I was having this same issue on both a new MacBook Air and 14 MBP, I was able to trick it to get going, highlighted all photos (Cmd+A) and left click, play slideshow, a prompt comes up that says downloading items for creating slideshow and it plows through them fairly quick.

You're the savior!!
Was stuck on downloading 8 originals (out of ~20K total items) for almost a day and this trick worked like a charm and got it done within seconds. Thank you!!