There’s no macOS issue I hear about more than iCloud Photo Library. It's a service that answers many users’ needs, but there are some not-quite-outlying demands that fall through the cracks. This often revolves around being able to get a full set of your images and movies in iCloud Photo Library if you don’t have enough storage on your Mac startup volume. Macworld reader Shai wrote in with such a concern recently.
They have a 300GB media library synced with iCloud Photo Library and a modest disk drive on their MacBook Pro, so Photos for macOS is set to optimize media. The full-resolution versions of images and video are thus only held in iCloud. When trying to extract their library to shift it to Google Photos, they hit a number of roadblocks. • As mentioned, they don’t have the local capacity to download. • iCloud.com doesn’t offer a great way to select and download multiple images. • On a higher-capacity Windows laptop, which had room for the full library, iCloud software stalled for hours and then filled the drive with unusable files and only retrieved 17GB of actual media files.