icloud photo's - SLOW

[Foggie]

Not sure if this is off topic, I'm trying to download all my photos from icloud to my Win10 wkst.  Nothing huge, 700'ish total number of files, mainly photos.  I have my iphone photo set to icloud photos so the photos are not stored on iphone.

 

Due to the ridiculous and basically uselessness of the icloud from a browser, you can't:

1. Download all files (select all, and select download)

2. Cannot multiple select many files at once or "all" files, you must Ctrl select each file one at a time (lol)

3. if you do Ctrl select a number of files and then select download, you are presented with a save/ok dialog for every file, really?

 

So I then installed the icloud for windows app which the documentation says you can download all files, perfect!  In the options, I set the location to an ext USB drive and proceeded to run the download.

 

Upon inspection, it created a number of folders based on the year and downloaded year 2019 pretty quick (90 photos).  Then for 2018 (says 182 photos, 24 vids in the download mgr) it did about half fairly quickly, but looking at the contents of this folder there are now 132 items but been 6 DAYS?  Nothing for years 2014-2017 as I assume it has to finish one folder at a time.

 

Is this really how it is suppose to work / perform?  Is there a better way?  All I want to do is clean up the library and delete some files I no longer need, but you cannot multiple select ANY freaking file from the browser. 

 

I suppose the other option is to just start sorting through all photos on my phone and delete multiples that way, dunno