My iCloud videos are not appearing in iMovie

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Level 1

21 points

My iCloud videos are not appearing in iMovie

Since updating to Catalina and the latest iMovie my iCloud videos have stopped showing in iMovie. I have 2000+ videos in iCloud (which I can see on the MacOS photos app) but the ones available in iMovie are stuck at 700.

I tried creating an album in Photos which contains all 2000 videos. The new album shows up in iMovie but only with 700 videos. I have also tried resetting iMovie preferences but to no avail.

Does anyone know how to get the iCloud videos to show in iMovie again?

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 28, 2019 7:20 PM

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Answer 1

Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Oct 29, 2019 6:46 PM in response to Rich839

Here’s an Apple article on downloading from the cloud.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209454

– Rich

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Answer 2

Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Oct 29, 2019 6:41 PM in response to jimmy_beard

I haven’t downloaded from the cloud so can’t speak from personal knowledge there. I am not aware of any setting that allows automatic selective downloading. From what I have read I believe that you need to log into iCloud.com and download them manually, either individually or as a batch.

— Rich

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Answer 3

Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Oct 28, 2019 10:59 PM in response to jimmy_beard

Not sure, but you might need to download the photos from the cloud if you

have optimized storage activated. Otherwise iMovie won't read them. Or, if the

photos are referenced and not actually copied to your Photos library iMovie

won't read them. You might check your Photos app iCloud preferences and General

preferences.

-- Rich

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Answer 4

jimmy_beard Author

Level 1

21 points

Oct 29, 2019 6:16 PM in response to Rich839

Thanks Rich - this seems to be working as the number of videos listed in iMovie is gradually increasing. The baffling thing is that prior to selecting to 'download all originals' to my Mac I couldn't see any indicators of which were stored locally and which weren't. ie. there was no 'download' (cloud) icon on the videos - all appeared as though they were local. And now it's downloading them all I can't see a way to view the download progress. Maybe I'm missing something...?

It would be ideal if you could use the optimised videos for editing in iMovie and then have it download the originals when the video was finalised and being exported (I actually thought that was already how it worked but guess I was wrong).

Anyway - thank you for the advice. Hopefully it's fixed the problem. Is there a way to select to 'download originals' for only selected folders? My iCloud library is going to be larger than my Mac internal storage can handle sooner or later, and I can only see a blanket option to download all originals.

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My iCloud videos are not appearing in iMovie

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