Access your photos on the web from Mac or PC at iCloud.com

iCloud is built into macOS and is part of the system. So is the Photos app for managing your photo collection. Did you know that all your photos are on the web? Here’s how to access them.

There are several reasons why you might want to access photos through a web browser and one is that your Mac might be broken. Although Macs are reliable, a component might fail on rare occasions, leaving you without a computer.

Another reason is that you might be at work and only have access to a work Mac that is not logged into your personal account, or perish the thought, a Windows PC! Without installing any software at all on your work computer, you can access your Photos library, view photographs, make favourites, email them to friends and relatives, and so on.

You can also download all your photos from the web.

iCloud Photos app

iCloud is not just a service for your Mac, iPhone and iPad, and it is a website too. You can access your Photos library through the website in any browser on any computer.

In order to do this you must first enable iCloud Photos. Go to System Preferences and click the Apple ID icon. Select iCloud on the left and in the list of iCloud apps, make sure that Photos is ticked. Then open the Photos app and go to Photos > Preferences > iCloud. Enable iCloud Photos. You might also want to select Download Originals to this Mac to ensure that iPhone photos are automatically synced to your Mac.

The only problem you are likely to encounter with this is that there isn’t enough online storage space. With just 5GB free on iCloud, you will probably need to purchase more storage space from Apple. However, 50 GB is very cheap and costs hardly anything.

Providing you have the storage space, either because your photo collection is small or you have paid for more gigabytes, you can fire up Safari, Chrome or whatever web browser you use and go to www.icloud.com. You can use any computer to log in to the site and it does not need to be yours or even an Apple Mac. It could be Windows or Linux PC. (2FA might mean you need to confirm login with a code on your iPhone.)

After logging in, click the Photos app to open it and show all the photographs in your Photos library. There are two tabs at the top: Photos and Moments. Select Moments and you can browse your photos, scrolling the web page to step back in time and view photos by date. The photos tab just shows all photos in the order they were taken with no dates.

The site used to be pretty slow, which made it awkward to use, but it seems faster and more responsive now. However, it may take a lot of scrolling to get to your oldest photos if you have a lot of them.

The first icon in the toolbar, to the right of iCloud Photos, shows or hides the sidebar. This is where you will find your library and albums. It is not exactly the same as the Photos app on the Mac, but it is very similar. There is a slider control in the toolbar and dragging it changes the size of the thumbnail images.

Click a thumbnail to view a large version of the photo. This is just like Photos on the Mac. However, there are no editing controls. That is a feature that needs adding if it is to keep up with Google Photos.

At the right side of the toolbar are five icons. The cloud with the up arrow enables you to upload photos from the computer, which can be Mac, PC or Linux, and add them to the Photos library. The plus button enables photos to be added to an album.

The cloud with the down arrow is for downloading one or more photos to whatever computer you are using. Click a photo to select it, click one photo then Shift+click another photo to select all between them. Then click the dowload button. Multiple photos are zipped up before downloading.

If a photo is selected, there is a heart icon in the toolbar too. Click the heart to mark an image as a favourite.Click the trash icon to delete a photo.

Video clips are stored online too and you can click one to play it in the browser.

Even if you stop syncing photos to iCloud, drop your MacBook and break it, or switch to a PC, your photos remain online and are accessible.

Accessing your Mac and iPhobe photos online through a web browser is worth remembering. You never know when it might come in useful.