1. Make sure everything is downloaded locally first
Before you touch the iCloud switch, confirm your Mac actually has full-resolution copies of every photo — not just space-saving thumbnails. In Photos on your Mac, open Settings → iCloud and make sure Download Originals to this Mac is selected, not "Optimize Mac Storage." Give it time to finish downloading — for a large library this can take hours, and you can watch progress at the bottom of the sidebar.
- 1Open Photos on your Mac, go to Settings → iCloud
- 2Choose "Download Originals to this Mac"
- 3Wait for the download to finish before proceeding — don't skip this part
If you'd rather skip the download-and-wait dance in Photos.app, install Raza Photos on your iPhone instead and set up Transfer pointed at your Mac. It reads directly from your device's photo library and sends everything — your full history, not just new shots — to the Mac server you configure, over Wi-Fi. Either path gets your photos onto your Mac; use whichever is less hassle for your library size.
2. Turn off iCloud Photos
Once everything is downloaded, turn off iCloud Photos syncing on every device — Mac, iPhone, and iPad. On each device, this lives under Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Photos. Your photos stay exactly where they already are on each device; only the syncing between them stops.
3. Point Raza Photos at the folder
Photos exported from Photos.app live in your Pictures library on disk. Open Raza Photos on your Mac and import that folder — it indexes the metadata (dates, locations, people, albums) and leaves every file exactly where it is. Nothing is copied, converted, or moved a second time.
4. Browse from your iPhone and iPad — no iCloud required
With iCloud Photos off, your iPhone's camera roll and your Mac's library are two separate things again. Raza Photos bridges that gap over your home Wi-Fi: open the app on any iPhone, iPad, or other Mac in the house, and it finds your library automatically using Bonjour — no IP address, no account, no setup.
5. Keep new iPhone photos flowing in, without iCloud
The one thing iCloud Photos used to handle automatically was getting new photos off your iPhone. Raza Photos' Transfer feature replaces that: open the Transfer sheet on your iPhone, pick your Mac library, and every new photo and video sends over Wi-Fi as you browse — no cable, no cloud, no import step.
Every Mac on your network with incoming transfers enabled shows up automatically. From then on, just browsing is enough — photos send quietly in the background.