I can't De-optimize Photos
My mother has recently asked me to clear her phone full of all her pictures so that she can sell it. Unfortunately, the reason she is getting rid of the phone is because of these pictures: they alone take up 4gb of her 16gb iphone. However, these pictures are not just normal ones, they are optimized with iCloud. I have heard that if the source device with the low-res optimized images is wiped, then the corresponding full sized images in our iCloud storage will be too. Now, I would just offload them using a mac I have, but it seems the optimized photos don't show up in the import section of the Photos app on the mac. From what I can tell, all signs tell me that I need to pull the full res versions from the icloud back on to my mother's phone, but there is no storage to fit them in during this transition period. The other option would be to download them from the icloud.com web portal, but I have thousands of images mixed in there from other devices we own. I don't want to download the images from the other devices, as there are likely many gigabytes of images. And from what I can tell, there is no way to filter by device source. My problem, in short, is as follows:
1. I can't de-optimize the photos, the phone doesn't have enough space
2. I can't use the iCloud web portal to download them, there are too many photos
3. I can't import them into the Photos app off the phone for some reason, they don't appear in the import pane.
Two solutions that might work that I can think of:
1. I'm missing some sort of filtering feature in the iCloud web portal that is not entirely obvious.
2. I need to add my mom's iCloud account on the mac I'm using so that I can access the photo stream and maybe there I can filter by device.
What is your take on this issue? do you think either of these solutions would work, or am I missing an entirely obvious solution? Please help.
The mac is a mid 2011 mac mini running macOS Sierra, I haven't signed in with my Apple ID yet because I'm borrowing it
The iPhone is a 6s with 16gb of storage, with the model identifier: "MKT72LL/A"
iPhone 6s, iOS 11
