Finder is not recognizing iCloud photos turned off on iPhone 13

Question

Finder is not recognizing iCloud photos turned off on iPhone 13

Hi everyone,

This is the next episode in my horror story re my apple account - would love to get your help on this.

My iCloud got deactivated after I sent a few cold iMessage messages to my prospects. I tried everything but the support could not really help me.

Now I need to reset my phone to do the and turned off iCloud Photos so new photos don’t save to iCloud. When I connect my iPhone in Finder to back up, the Photos tab still shows: “You can access every photo and video you take from any device. To sync photos from this Mac, turn off iCloud Photos.”

How do I make Finder recognize that iCloud Photos is off? Is there a way to verify this on the Mac or iPhone so Finder will allow photo sync?

Also, what’s the best tool or method to export my iCloud Photos library? I’m open to exporting on Mac, via iCloud.com, or transferring to another service.

Device details:

• iPhone 13, latest iOS

• Photos app: iCloud Photos set to Off in the iPhone settings after the account got disabled.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Finder says “To sync photos from this Mac, turn off iCloud Photos” even after I turned it off

iPhone 13 Pro

Posted on Oct 13, 2025 2:32 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 15, 2025 8:03 AM in response to icloudquestions12

The best way to backup your iCloud Photos to a Mac is to create a new Photos Library, make it the System Library, and connect it to iCloud-- and wait for it to fill up. It may take awhile, but it's automatic, and you get everything-- originals, edited versions, comments, faces-- everything that's at iCloud Photos. See this:

Make a New System Library connected to iC… - Apple Community

For a backup, you should use an external drive, as the link suggests.

For your iPhone, have you tried a forced restart?

Force restart iPhone - Apple Support

This is different from a simple Power Off. I had to continue holding the button down past the "slide to power off" message, and then I released the button only after the Apple Logo appeared indicating a re-start.

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Answer 2

shoeluvr13

Level 6

18,505 points

Oct 13, 2025 4:34 PM in response to icloudquestions12

On your phone go to Settings > your name > iCloud > Photos and make sure Sync to this Phone is disabled.

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Answer 3

Oct 13, 2025 4:50 PM in response to shoeluvr13

Thanks @shoeluvr13, I tried this but unfortunately this does not seem to suffice as it still shows the same setting on my Finder window that it was turned on.

Could it be related to my mac having iCloud photos turned on as well? Then I guess I could reach the same result when doing the backup to a guest user account?

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Answer 4

Oct 13, 2025 7:35 PM in response to icloudquestions12

EDIT: I tried it with my new guest user (no Apple Account logged in) and it still showed the same issue that my iPhone would be syncing to iCloud Photos and thus the photos could not be imported to my Mac.

It seems like I cannot turn iCloud Photos off as it asks me if I want to delete my photos or download them. When I select download, it warns me that "An additional 32,28GB is required."

I had ca. 90 GB of free storage. Then I tried to delete more files but after that it still showed that I was missing 32,28GB on my phone.

Is there no way to turn off iCloud Photos on my phone once my Apple Account was blocked?

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