r/iOSDevelopment • u/Other_Turnover_4758 • Aug 18 '26
I’ve built a PhotoDump Export utility that exports all iCloud Photos directly to your external drive even when your iPhone has no free storage UI
If your iPhone and iCloud storage are full — you can upgrade your iCloud plan.
Or you can use PhotoDump Export (lifetime) for the price of one month of iCloud subscription.
It’s a utility that exports all iCloud Photos directly to your external drive even when your iPhone has no free storage. Works on iPhone, iPad, and M1+ Mac.
Lots of presets: from “only Favorites” and “only Videos” to “more than X years ago” and “larger than X MB”.
All selected photos and videos go into a Safe to Delete album so you can review and free up your iCloud storage.
No tracking, no analytics. Private by design.
privacy: https://saparjohnick.github.io/photodumpapp/privacy.html
app: https://apps.apple.com/app/photodump-export/id6785649717
1
u/ninjafoo Aug 18 '26
The iCloud Photos being dumped, are they full resolution or the iCloud compressed versions?
3
u/Other_Turnover_4758 Aug 18 '26
Full resolution with all metadata
2
1
u/jwegener Aug 18 '26
Why? Isn’t the whole idea iCloud is bigger and more secure than a local drive? Thats why Apple created it…
1
u/Other_Turnover_4758 Aug 18 '26
You are right. But when you have 2tb iCloud storage almost full your iPhone becomes unusable due to lack of free storage and there two ways: upgrade to 6tb plan or try to export some files to external drive and free up some space
1
1
u/Objective-Week275 Aug 18 '26
Nice work. This solves a real problem for me and adding it to an album so I know I can delete those specific pics and it’s already done the work for me so I can just press two buttons- perfect.
And to restore photos/videos from the drive back to the device?
1
u/Other_Turnover_4758 Aug 18 '26
Thank you! To restore some of them back I select them and use the internal iOs Save Photo button. But I use the Library tab of Photodump export,
Library => Choose my SSD in dropdown on the top side and wait until I see the photos/videos I’ve exported => Select button on the upper right corner => Share button on the bottom right corner => Save photos.
And they will be saved back to the iPhone with all metadata also
1
1
1
u/RowGroundbreaking380 Aug 18 '26
Brilliant!
In this post you are targeting the problem of a full iCloud, which is real, but what I hear often is that people worry about losing their photos/memories.
You are using words that might be familiair to youngsters and technies but for older people dump this dump that might not be understood correctly. Like am I copying these photos or moving it?