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Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

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Re: Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

#52
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in fairness, Microsoft's Office365 subscriptions conveniently include 1TB of OneDrive storage. So, if you already need the other Microsoft Office apps, and are already going to pay for them, you essentially get 1TB of cloud storage "for free".

Bundling a spreadsheet app with photo storage ought to be against some competition rule... Just like Amazon has taken over so many markets with Prime...

Disagree. As Steve job puts it: dropbox (and cloud storage in general) is "a feature and not a product".

Re: Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

#53
post #5

A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon, but it's still miles better than iCloud Photos in almost everything. From search, to timeline overview, to seamless integration with my Chromecast, to automatic face tagging, to editing.

How about privacy?

Re: Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

#54
post #53
post #5

A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon, but it's still miles better than iCloud Photos in almost everything. From search, to timeline overview, to seamless integration with my Chromecast, to automatic face tagging, to editing.

How about privacy?

I haven't seen any of my photos given out to anyone, so what's your concern? The ToS also doesn't say anything about sharing my private photos.

Re: Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

#55

Unrelated, but this reminds me of a recent incident. A friend came over to me asking for help transferring his WhatsApp chats from his old iPhone to his new Android phone. Turns out there is no official/practical way to do that, and he lost all hos chat and media records made across years (WhatsApp is the main mode of communication here, it's like opening up your official mail inbox one day and finding it completely…

It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy. Even people who are aware that e2e encryption is only enabled on Telegram when you explicitly open a private chat soon abandon it because it lacks multi-device support which makes it easy to miss messages.

WhatsApp has always simplified their security model by not even attempting to support multiple devices (the desktop app communicates via your phone instead of directly with the servers). This greatly simplifies the server infrastructure for WhatsApp too, but there really is no good excuse for them not supporting portable local backup and restore after all these years.

For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.

Re: Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

#56
post #26

This article is a little weird. The title is actually "Transfer a copy of your iCloud Photos collection to another service " but then the small print says "...to Google Photos." It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet? It also only allows customers from a small fraction of countries to use this, which I really don't get. Maybe those are all the places iCloud Photos and…

Yeah, just a small fraction of countries, like the United States and the European Union. I'm sure nobody cares about those places.

Can you think of any reasons why it would be limited to just those countries? Note that I'm _not_ asking why those countries are nifty. I'm asking what you think Apple gains by limiting it to just those countries in the first place or would lose by not limiting it to just those countries. The feature technology would be the same regardless of where you are, so saying "only available to users in X" seems like an arbitrary restriction. And there are surely orders of magnitude more Apple iCloud users in Japan or India than in Liechtenstein.

Re: Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

#57
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet? Considering the fourth word of the second paragraph is "initially," I think you're correct — this is a work in progress. I hope that Apple will eventually allow bulk downloads of iCloud photos to the desktop. Right now you can only do 1,000 at a time, and it took me almost a week to make a local backup of my wife's iCloud photos…

> I hope that Apple will eventually allow bulk downloads of iCloud photos to the desktop. Right now you can only do 1,000 at a time When downloading directly from iCloud.com that's true (and annoying), but you can also bulk download all of the originals via Photos.app (making sure to check "Download Originals to this Mac" rather than "Optimize Mac Storage").

When downloading directly from iCloud.com that's true (and annoying), but you can also bulk download all of the originals via Photos.app (making sure to check "Download Originals to this Mac" rather than "Optimize Mac Storage").

Unfortunately, that wouldn't work for my wife's situation. Her computer is one of those MacBooks with a 256GB drive, and only one USB-C port. So the amount of data stored in her iCloud photos would easily overload her drive, and if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed.

I'm not interested in buying a hub for a one-off operation.

I tried afp:// and smb:// mounting Photos libraries on large drives on other machines on the LAN, then downloading the photos to those, but that turned out to be excruciatingly slow, and very unreliable.

Re: Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

#58
post #3

Then we are only missing google providing the same service! (I know of google takeout, which is great but not the same as this)

Takeout is NOT great, at least in my case. I never once managed to fully download my photo archive, despite my repeated attempts. I gave up, so my current "strategy" for keeping my photos safe is "Never ever do anything that might make Google algorithms think that I'm violating their ToS".

Re: Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

#59
post #3

Then we are only missing google providing the same service! (I know of google takeout, which is great but not the same as this)

I recently moved photos from google photos to icloud using google takeout and it removed meta data from the vast majority of my photos.

Photos with correct dates and locations in google photos not longer have any of that data in icloud. Makes icloud photos a lot less usable, not sure if anyone else has had this issue (can't find any articles on it)

Anyways agree that google takeout needs improvement.

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