Importing Photos from iCloud to Lightroom Classic on Windows

The process is straightforward but there are some pitfalls to be aware of. I’m writing this post because I had a hard time finding much useful information, and its always helpful to have some notes to refer to next time.

I switched from Android to iPhone in October 2020 and have been accumulating photos and videos in iCloud ever since then. I’ve put off trying to import those files into my Lightroom catalog because I was afraid the process would be too tedious. But it turns out that it’s really simple although I did have a couple of false starts before I found a process that works best for me.

First off, I am a Windows user, so this process probably does not apply to Mac users. As far as I know, there are three primary methods to import image files from iCloud: (1) through the iCloud for Windows app, (2) downloading from iCloud.com, and (3) importing to Lightrrom mobile on iOS. The process I’m sharing here is based on #2, and I’ll explain the pitfalls I found with the other methods later in this post.

Downloading from iCloud.com

The first step is the download. iCloud.com allows the user to download a maximum of 500 images at a time, and those can be any combination of images, videos, live photos, etc. Unfortunately, there’s no ability to search by date so that files could be downloaded a month at a time for example, but it’s easy enough to select a group of images by scrolling and shift-clicking.

The key here is not to download using the cloud icon but rather by using the More Download Options dialog. Click on this then select the option to download “Unmodified Originals.” The default using the cloud icon is to download “Most Compatible” versions of the image files which mean downsampled JPG images rather than full resolution HEIC photos. (I’m sure this also affects the quality of downloaded video files but I didn’t bother to check.)

Your files will be downloaded as a zip files containing all of the selected photos and videos. I tried to select 400 to 500 files for each download, and the zip file size varied from about 4 to 12 GBs depending on how many videos were included in the selection.

Once the zip file was downloaded, I extracted the image files into a temporary folder then synchronized this folder in Lightroom Classic to import the images into my catalog. From there, I scanned through, rejected, and deleted any images that I did not want to permanently import, renamed the files using my standard renaming preset, then moved groups of images into the appropriate folders in my Lightroom catalog. (If you need help with your image organization, I recommend Peter Krogh’s multimedia guide.)

iCloud for Windows

The screenshot below shows one of the problems I encountered using the iCloud for Windows app-all of the photos and many of the videos contained random numbers in parentheses in the filenames. Some people may not be bothered by this, but I was seriously annoyed.

Aside from this issue, iCloud for Windows provides a much simpler and easier to manage interface for downloading files in bulk. If I needed to download thousands of images, I think it would be worth the effort to find or write a script to strip the parenthetical numbers from the filenames after they had been copied to the local hard drive. Since I was able to download all of my images in just a handful of iterations, it was easier to just select the images and download from iCloud.com.

The other issue with iCloud for Windows is that Live Photos are not included-neither the photo nor the video file are available through the app. But iCloud.com allows you to filter for Live Photos, so it would be easy enough to download Live Photos separately while using iCloud for Windows for the other photos and videos in the library.

Importing to Lightroom Mobile

Some Lightroom purists only take phone photos using the Lightroom camera app so that all of their photos are automatically added to their Lightroom cloud photo library. I often use the Lightroom camera app to capture raw photos using my phone but I can’t imagine using it exclusively because the app is really slow to load. There’s also an option to automatically import all images to the Lightroom cloud library as they are captured. This might be worth exploring, but personally I think it would create more organizational headaches.

Another option is directly to import photos to the Lightroom cloud photo library on the phone then migrate those images onto the hard drive in Lightroom Classic (following this process). I looked into this option but immediately abandoned the idea when I realized that there are no date filtering options available to use when selecting images to import.

I think this might be a viable option if done frequently, such as to import the previous month’s images, but it is definitely not a good option for importing thousands of images. Also, importing even a modest number of images and videos will likely consume all of the available cloud storage if using Adobe’s standard photography plan with 20 GB of cloud storage, For these reasons, I don’t intend to import photos en masse using Lightroom mobile. I did import a single HEIF photo to confirm that photos are migrated in the original format (they are).