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I'm trying to help someone with an iPhone/PC combination to get to their iCloud photo library on the PC. They have a large storage plan they pay Apple for, and the iCloud control panel in Windows shows they have 4.4GB of Photo Library (photos and videos) stashed on Apple's servers. But the iCloud Photos folder only has stuff from the last 30 days, and it's about 100MB. Where's the other 4.3-ish GB on the PC? Is it on the PC? How do we get it on the PC?

Log into iCloud through a browser. Navigate to the Photos folder. At the top you should see four icons, A folder, Cloud /w up arrow, Cloud w/ down arrow, and trash can.

Click the cloud with down arrow and it will open up a windows navigation and you can then dump everything that's there to a folder/drive.

Depending on how the user set it up they may have duplicates. iCloud saves the unedited originals along with any that have been edited. The phone or ipad normally keeps the last 30 days readily available the older stuff is transferred to their iCloud.

I hope that helps. It took me a bit to understand really how it works and was quite confusing for me too.

Thanks Tanker. Not sure if it's because the user turned on iCloud Drive or what, but the web interface looked a little different than you described. Still, using Chrome, I was able to go into the All Pictures album, select the first, shift+click the last to select all, and then download. Amusingly it's downloading them all separately instead of giving to the browser as a ZIP.

Wish there was a way to get the full photos library to sync to a PC. It's something that is very obviously missing. Having to use the web interface is incredibly stupid. The control panel should do it, but the photo stream only shows the last 30 days of stuff.

I suggested that she use OneDrive app to do the sync from now on, and she's got like 20GB available to her which is plenty at least for now. I have like 230GB free so that's what I've been doing with my iPhone 6 like the Android devices before it.

Glad you were able to retrieve them all. I also think the 'service' is a bit cluncky and can be better laid out. I found that there were somethings missing from the control panel too, it 'should' sync but doesnt. so I just use the web interface. It's funny you mention OneDrive because I also back up there too, so I have a backup of a backup.

I am using iPhone 6, and I often accidentally delete some valued photos on my iPhone. I want to recover photo form my iCloud. But my friend says it's possible to download pictures from icloud if we have data recovery software. Anyone know more about this?