This is the approach I arrived at to download hundreds of JPEG image files from an Amazon S3 directory. The accepted method of using Laravel's response() helper function failed miserably to work for me. What a PITA working with cloud web services. Anyway, here is the web route that does the job.

Route::get('/dev/s3/download-to-local-storage', function() 
{

    set_time_limit(0);
    ini_set('memory_limit', '128M');

    $files = Storage::disk('s3')->allFiles('original');

    foreach($files as $file) 
    {
        $tmp=explode('/', $file);
        $path=Storage::disk('s3')->url($file);
        $dump=public_path('/storage/images/tmp/'.$tmp[1]);

        file_put_contents($dump, file_get_contents($path));
    }

    set_time_limit(60);

});

The directory in question is called original and I explode the $file to extract the actual filename without the directory included. So if you've had niggling problems (and who hasn't) with downloading files from S3 then perhaps this approach will present better results for you.