My iPad, iPhone and 2012 MacBook Air all share my iCloud Photos. BTW, this group was a good source of info on how to merge old photos from the Mac with newer photos from the phone. So thanks again.
The Mac is setup to keep “non-optimized” images and documents. I back up the Mac to an external SSD to give me a standalone full backup of my photos and documents in case something happens to iCloud.
The mac crashes a lot now. Tried a new drive to no avail. I hardly ever use it, so I don’t want to replace it. I’ll be Mac less for the first time since 1985!
I plugged an SSD into my iPad and I can see the document folders and can manually copy them to the SSD as a backup.
However, I can’t find where the photos are stored to back them up in a similar manner (probably by design). My googling found tedious ways to “export” photos which would be a real pain for a large library.
Is there a way to backup iCloud Photos without a Mac? Probably most iPhone / iPad users never even consider the need to backup photos, so should I join the masses and stop worrying…
Of course, Apple has made it very hard to select all photos unfortunately on iOS and iPadOS. You can choose the “Select” button at the top and then start using your finger to drag across and then up to the top, and the selection will start scrolling and selecting as you go, but it is VERY slow if you have thousands of photos/videos, and there is no select all. It is honestly easier to do on a Mac, or even on iCloud.com on a browser from a computer (where there is a Select All) and export them from there.
I have exported photos from an iPhone in the past - I was on an ocean cruise with very intermittent WiFi connectivity, and the cruise company blocked connectivity to Apple’s sync servers if I remember right, so I exported the photos that I took to an external flash drive every day. So I didn’t need to select all photos - just the ones that I hadn’t exported already.
You can also log in to icloud.com from Safari (or I’d guess any browser) on the iPad (or presumably iPhone), where you do have Select All. Downloading more than one photo downloads a zip file (just like on a Mac) to whatever you’ve got Settings > Safari > Downloads set to (I don’t have an external SSD for my iPad, so don’t know if it would show up there or not, or at least be selectable via Other…).