Move your iCloud photos to a NAS
Every photo and video Apple holds, on a drive in your own home, in dated folders, with the real capture dates written back in and the duplicates gone.
Why bother
iCloud storage is rented, and the bill only goes one way. A NAS you buy once, and the photos stay yours whether or not you keep paying anybody.
What actually goes wrong
- Apple sends HEIC, and the NAS may not show it
- iPhone photographs come back in their original format. Some NAS photo apps render HEIC happily and some show grey squares forever. Check with a handful before copying the whole library, and if yours cannot cope, export as JPEG from Muletto instead of converting afterwards.
- The seven-day wait is the long pole
- Apple takes up to a week and gives no progress. Request the export first, then set up the NAS share while you wait, rather than doing them in order.
- Copying over wifi will take all night
- A large library across wifi is measured in hours. Plug the machine in with a cable for the first copy; everything after that is small by comparison.
Ask Apple for your data
Free, and required by law - but it takes up to 7 days (Apple emails you when it is ready), so start it now and come back. The full guide has the steps and the traps.
Open it in your browser
Drop the archive into Muletto. It is read on your own machine - nothing is uploaded - and you get a timeline, your pictures, your conversations and a map of where you have been. Open several exports together and they merge into one library.
Large archives are fine. They are read in pieces rather than loaded whole, so size is not the limit it usually is in a browser.
Clean it up before you move it
This is the step worth not skipping, because it is far easier now than once the files are spread across a disk.
- Duplicates across services. The same photo backed up to two places is one photo. Muletto finds byte-identical copies and near-copies - a burst, a crop, a re-save - and you choose what a tidied library keeps.
- Dates that got lost. Exports routinely strip the capture date, so everything looks like it was taken the day you downloaded it. Muletto reads the real date back out and writes it into the file itself.
- Places. Where the coordinates survived, they are written back in too, so whatever you import into can put things on a map.
Put it on Any NAS (network folder)
Muletto writes the tidied library straight out - into dated folders on a drive or a network share, or as a single archive. You choose the arrangement, and it writes an index of everything it wrote.
The destination guide covers the part that happens at the other end.
When it is done
Every photo and video Apple holds, on a drive in your own home, in dated folders, with the real capture dates written back in and the duplicates gone.
Check it worked. Open a few photographs from different years on the NAS and check the dates are the dates they were taken, not the day you copied them. Then set up whatever backup the NAS offers, because one NAS is still one copy in one building.
Keep the work file Muletto offers at the end. Export again next year and it recognises everything that carried over, so none of this has to be done twice.