I am a happy user of iCloud and before that mobile me. Point that is bugging me is that I have the cloud on various iPhones, iPads and my iMac at home. On holidays I am taking my macbook pro along.

http://download.cnet.com/FonePaw-iPhone-Data-Recovery/3000-18551_4-76201237.html
Finally I used FonePaw iPhone Data Recovery, and it helped me to download photos from iCloud in only 3 steps.

http://www.fonepaw.com/tutorials/download-icloud-photos.html