I have an iPhone with iCloud Photos enabled and Optimize iPhone Storage

My iCloud storage filled up at some point, so new photos and videos stopped syncing properly. I also deleted some stuff from iCloud in between, so now I'm not sure which videos have their full resolution originals stored locally and which ones are still only in iCloud or have just optimized versions on my phone.

I want to transfer only the videos whose full quality originals are already stored locally on my iPhone to my Windows PC, so I can free up space.

The problem is that I have way too many videos to check individually, and the Photos app doesn't seem to have a filter for locally downloaded originals.

Is there any way to identify these videos in bulk? Maybe through Windows File Explorer, a third party tool, metadata, or some other method?

Ideally, I want to avoid accidentally downloading all the originals from iCloud just to transfer them.

I'd really appreciate advice from anyone who's dealt with this exact situation. Thanks!

Hi, i recently lost my iphone with my 2fa codes on, i need to access them without getting a new phone, is there anyway to do that? the only other apple device i own is my old original iPad Air.

Thanks

If you've been trying to sign into the iCloud app on Windows and nothing works, you are maybe running into a time-sync conflict like me, between Windows and Apple's servers. Changing your time server to a public NTP pool ( pool.ntp.org ) combined with a specific app reset sequence fixed it for me and 2 of my friends, hope this helps anyone here.

Step 1: Fix the Time Server

1. Open Windows Settings.
2. Go to Time & Language > Date & Time.
3. Click the drop-down menu for Sync Now.
4. Change the time server from the default to pool.ntp.org
5. Save and exit (do not hit sync yet).

Step 2: Terminate and Repair iCloud

1. Go to Windows Settings > Apps > Installed Apps.
2. Locate the iCloud app, click the three dots, and select Advanced options.
3. Click Terminate first.
4. Click Repair.
5. Do not open the iCloud app yet.

Step 3: Sync Time and Sign In

1. Go back to Date & Time settings.
2. Click Sync Now and wait for it to synchronize.
3. Launch the iCloud app and sign in.

I hope this helps anyone! I was stuck on this issue for over a week now.

So i used to have an old ipod touch 4th gen. I haven't used apple in years. And when i tried to log into my old icloud account. I was locked out, even when i had the password. Or at least an old one. Back when icloud accounts had an @me on the email. I cant log into the icloud to retrieve the reset email when im locked out. I dont remember what i put for the birthday.

Looking for tips to thoroughly double check this situation. Will toggling push or fetch make a difference?

My iCloud mail inbox, both online and on the phone is empty, except for one item that's a week old. Normally there are a few emails, maybe a hundred. Trash is empty. The drafts, sent and a folder I created look normal. I don't remember if I had anything in Archive, but it's empty. So far there's no evidence of recently deleted mail.

While troubleshooting this I noticed 3 contacts items listed in iCloud recovery. Are old versions of recently updated contacts also listed in the recovery section? I don't recall deleting any contacts but I've updated a few recently.

So, I'm ADHD and heavily dependent on Reminders to keep me on task. I'm using it on a Mac, iPad, and iPhone, all running (as of yesterday) 27.2, plus an ancient Apple Watch (which I'm pretty sure isn't the cause of the problem - keep reading).

The problem is that, starting roughly around when I originally updated to Golden Gate, the Reminders UI started getting slower and slower, would hang when I checked a task as completed, and eventually just became completely unresponsive.

Called Apple Support, we spent hours trying to debug the issue, no love.

So, to try and isolate the issue, I deleted the 3rd party reminders app I was using (Unforgetful) and I turned off iCloud reminders on all my devices, deleted all the reminders from each device, and from the iCloud web interface, then re-started syncing. After a few hours, things seemed to be working but still kind of slow... I did not reinstall Unforgetful, assuming it was the cause of the issue and I did not re-pair the apple watch.

But 2 weeks later the problem is back: hangs, unresponsive UI, etc... but this time, when I tried to turn iCloud syncing back on, the devices all froze on what seemed like a permanent spinner.

I turned everything off again, deleted everything again, created 3 test reminders (one on Mac, one on icloud, one on iPhone), and turned on iCloud syncing on the Mac and iPhone. Same behavior. So, I let it sit and, after about 30 minutes, the spinner went away on the Mac and I decided to scan the remindd log:

~/Desktop/Reminders scripts » log show --last 24h --predicate 'process == "remindd" AND eventMessage CONTAINS     "Record changed"' \
  | grep -oE 'recordID: <[A-Za-z]+/[0-9A-F-]+' > ~/Desktop/remindd-records.txt
wc -l < ~/Desktop/remindd-records.txt                 # total deliveries
sort -u ~/Desktop/remindd-records.txt | wc -l         # distinct records
sort -u ~/Desktop/remindd-records.txt | sed -E 's/recordID: <([A-Za-z]+)\/.*/\1/' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
  278491
  138731
  135437 RecurrenceRule
  1150 Reminder
  1024 Alarm
  1023 AlarmTrigger
   75 ListSection
   18 List
   3 SmartList
   1 ManualSortHint

So, with only 3 reminders total there are nearly 136 thousand unique recurrence rules!?!

Can anyone suggest a fix for this? I can't figure out how to clean out these rules from iCloud and I'm fairly sure frontline Apple Support is just going to run through a script involving me logging out of icloud a few times. (I also have no idea if something is still creating more and more of these RecurrenceRules...)

Recently, somebody marked my personal member as spam and now I am not receiving text messages to my phone, but they will go to my laptop. I’ve contacted Apple for about a week now every day. I have done so many things to this device we’ve done a factory reset I’ve called my carrier. We backed everything up from the iCloud. We wiped out my phone as if it was a brand new phone. We’ve gone through all of the settings, we’ve done the whole send and receive and still will not recognize my phone number at this point I do not know what else to do other than to keep contacting Apple every single day, but I feel like there needs to be a reason why it is being blocked.

So i was trying to sync my messages with iCloud but it kept pausing no matter what i did. Restart my phone plug in my phone nothing helped. I’m home on very stable WiFi nothing has fixed it.

I usually don’t store anything sensitive on my PC because of how Windows is when it comes to privacy. My PC is mainly for gaming. And when you have games on your computer, some of these games have very invasive anti-cheats that have access to your PC on a system level. For example, the Riot Vanguard anti-cheat. By that, I mean these programs can supposedly see anything that’s running on your PC.

This got me wondering - if I install iCloud on my PC and log in there, how safe are my photos, videos, files etc? Is it possible that someone other than me can see my stuff? I have ADP and everything turned on on my iPhone. Still not sure though .

Apologies if this comes off as silly. Just wanna clarify.

was icloud down for a couple of minutes? i was just checking my profile via settings and the trusted device is not loading?? and i changed the password just in case... anyone experienced it?

So I wanted to try out icloud and apple tv but i want to cancel it now. I dont have apple devices and subscribed via browser on my pc.

Apple is making it very difficult to unsubscribe. Can someone please advise on how to deal with this. Thank you.

Hi! I am not tech savvy, at all. My 17 year old son has recently started on a pathway of criminal behavior (stealing, drugs, etc.). He stole my infrequently used iPad for 4 months and it mirrored my iPhone. Somehow he has it set up so that all messages for my iCloud account go to his phone or iCloud, instead of me. My iCloud’s username is also my email address to my everyday email account. I don’t know how many of my emails are being diverted to him. Can someone help me undo this?

Has anyone figured it out? or are we just waiting for apple to fix this? can't use apple passwords on pc because clicking verify account just leads to the title

I have issues installing and logging into iCloud on my Windows. It's either the store variant telling me to update or, if I get the correct one, I get the "iCloud for windows hasn't been fully initialised. Wait a moment and try again"

I have had off and on issues with a message appearing in one device and not the other, and then doing all the steps I read online about re-logging into iCloud, hitting "Sync Now" on both devices, etc, all with no luck.

An example is today I received a message a bit ago with the pop up preview on my iPhone, yet when I opened iMessage it strangely wasn't there (even though I had read part of the preview) Then, when I opened my Macbook, I could see the message, but I couldn't see the voice note I had sent the same person hours ago (it seems like it syncs sent voice notes between devices maybe ~50% of the time).

In general, it sporadically makes it so I get a message on my Macbook only or on my iPhone only and doesn't fill in that history in the other device if I do a resync in iCloud settings.

Has anyone experienced this behavior and found an actual solution or is this something people just live with, it is annoying that I can be out somewhere without my laptop and get a message from someone that won't actually get to me until I open my laptop later.

How do I save 70,000 or so photos to an external hard drive?

Hello,

I'm trying to download my entire iCloud photo library (~250GB) to my PC. I want the end result to be folders sorted by year.

I downloaded all my data from privacy.apple.com, but it came out a mess. In my research I found iCloud Photos Downloader, but it seems quite complex and I'm not really understanding the Github for it.

Does anyone have a step by step tutorial to achieve what I'm looking for, even with another tool? Thank you! :)

I cannot unsync my MacBook the photos just casually catch 100g of storage because of it anyone know how to fix it🙏
What I’ve done is setting -> click my name -> iCloud -> photos -> the button for stop syncing
But it always stayed blue also did a restart still didn’t work🙏

Hi guys!!!! Question lang po huhuhu dalawa kasi phone ko, yung ip11 ko nakalimutan ko password tas nag 1 hr unavailable na siya.

Same kasi sya ng icloud sa ip16 ko. Ang concern ko pag ba nireset ko ip11 ko mawawala din ba mga apps or photos na nasa 16 ko? Alam ko ksi di na ssync lately yung ip16 ko sa icloud pero ayun palagi ginagamit ko kumbaga backup lang si 11 Huhu sorry di ko po alam. Thank you sa mga sasagot. 🤍🫶🏻

I use rules to file my email into a bunch of folders, and I love that part. The problem is there's no single place on iPhone or iCloud.com to see everything that came in, across every folder, newest first. Gmail's "All Mail" does exactly that.

Smart Mailboxes come close, but they only work on the Mac. So on my phone I end up tapping through folder after folder to find one email.

I already sent this to Apple at apple.com/feedback. If you want it too, sending your own feedback probably helps. Has anyone found a good workaround in the meantime?

I've followed countless tutorials, but most of them seem to be outdated. When I open the iCloud app and navigate to Storage > Add Storage, I'm not given a list of available iCloud+ subscription plans as expected. Instead, I'm prompted to follow a link below to manage my iCloud subscriptions. However, the hyperlink doesn't work when I click it, leaving me unable to access the subscription options (Or whatever it was attempting to link me to).

I ordered (and am receiving tomorrow) my Duo and am trying to free up some space on my phone (images/videos). I currently have a 1tb plan, but downgraded to 256g. I thought logging into iCloud.com would be a fast/easy fix, but as per their usual, Apple products hate to do their job correctly/consistently. This happens, btw, when I try to delete OR recover items. Anyone else run into this and know a fix? I’ve already tried refreshing the browser; using a different browser, clearing cache (and history).

I have been using Google contacts, synched between my MacBook, iPhone, and iPad for years. I recently decided to prune my contact list and move it to iCloud. I have just under 200 contacts, and they all display correctly on iCloud, iPhone, and iPad.

On my MacBook, there are still loads of older contacts that I can't get rid of. If I disable iCloud sync on my MacBook, all the contacts disappear, but when I re-enable iCloud sync, all the contacts come back, even the ones that aren't in iCloud.

I have disabled Contacts > Settings > Show Siri Suggestions and System Settings > Siri > App Access > Contacts > Show Siri Suggestions for contacts, but the extra contacts still appear.

Is there any way of fixing this so that my Contacts app on my MacBook only shows the contacts in my iCloud account?

Hi everyone. I’m looking for advice from anyone who has experienced something similar while transferring Google Photos to iCloud Photos.

I’m switching completely from Google Photos to iCloud Photos and want to consolidate my entire photo library into Apple’s ecosystem. I have approximately 120 GB of photos and videos in Google Photos.

Here’s what happened:

1. I upgraded to the 200 GB iCloud+ plan.

2. I enabled iCloud Photos on my iPhone and successfully synced 1,100+ photos to iCloud.

3. I verified that my photos were visible on iCloud.com/ipad/macbook

4. I initiated Google’s direct Google Photos to iCloud Photos transfer. I followed the instructions, selected iCloud as the destination, and authorized the transfer using my Apple Account.

5. Got confirmation both from google and apple through my email about the transfer

6. Then this morning, I noticed an album called “Imported from Google” containing approximately 800 photos in my iPhone

7. However, I also discovered that all my original 1,100+ iPhone photos had disappeared from my main library and were in Recently Deleted!!!

8. The Google Photos transfer was still in progress when I discovered this, and I knew there were many more photos left to transfer.

9. I recovered the deleted photos, and they returned to my main library.

10. My iPhone currently shows “Optimizing Library” at 57%.

My questions:

Anyone got any idea what happened?
My goal is to move completely from Google Photos to iCloud Photos, so I’d appreciate advice from anyone who has completed a similar migration.

I expected this process to be a straightforward way to move my Google Photos library into iCloud. I never expected to wake up and find my entire original iPhone photo library in Recently Deleted when I hadn’t deleted anything myself.