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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

#91

Post by jmfisch »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #83

Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload? There aren't any other real competitors AFAIK, but still why not just make it a simple export rather than an integration that will require continual maintenance?

Convenience, speed, and technical difficulty (for the typical person, not HN reader). Definitely, I've faced this problem. My photo and video library on Google Photos is now much larger than the free space I have on any device. The hassle of downloading in chunks, just to re-upload (and heaven help anyone on an ISP with data caps) is huge. It's also probably very slow - consider the bandwidth between an Apple and a Google server - most likely in the 10Gbps range? Compare that with an average person doing 50Mbps down and then 8Mbps up. For a 500GB library that takes _hours_.

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

#92

Post by lxgr »

dangwu wrote: post #68

If any Google Photos product people are here... Since you're ending free unlimited photo storage, I badly want a feature that automatically finds all groupings of similar photos and deletes all but the best one (least blurry, most smiles, whatever you decide). Whenever I take photos, I tend to spam the shutter button, so I end up with 3+ photos of anything and everything. I could stay on Google Photos for many, many…

I'd second that, or alternatively just a plan that lets me upload unlimited photos for a monthly fee like Flickr used to do very early on.

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

#93

Post by jjcon »

ransom_rs wrote: post #67
modeitsch wrote: post #66

It’s good that apple offers this but when you try to move your photos away from google photos It’s hard like hell

Isn't Google Takeout pretty easy?

Google takeout rips out a lot of metadata information and virtually all organization you had - there are a couple open source projects trying to replace or augment gphotos takeout so it is useable but as is it isn’t a viable option for large libraries

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

#94

Post by lostlogin »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #44
janlaureys wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal annoyance with automatic face tagging: Old dog and new dog look very similar. Google keeps tagging my new dog as if he were my old dog and I haven't found a way to fix that without manually going through every single picture and untagging/retagging.

I'm just amazed these services have face tagging for dogs , and that you consider it so obvious that you feel like complaining about it.

I uploaded a 4D obstetric ultrasound to get rid of the CD. Photos.app tagged it as my child. That blew my mind.

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

#95

Post by ronyeh »

boatsie wrote: post #78
dangwu wrote: post #68

If any Google Photos product people are here... Since you're ending free unlimited photo storage, I badly want a feature that automatically finds all groupings of similar photos and deletes all but the best one (least blurry, most smiles, whatever you decide). Whenever I take photos, I tend to spam the shutter button, so I end up with 3+ photos of anything and everything. I could stay on Google Photos for many, many…

I wish this existed as well but with the added element of AI based merging where it can take the best in focus faces (eyes open and smiling) and composite them into a single image. Seems very possible but I haven’t heard of an implementation.

Google Photos used to have this! It had a auto magic filter that combined multiple shots into a magic shot with no blinks and all smiles.

Like most things from Google, the engineers and PMs on that feature got promoted and the feature eventually went away.

It was called Auto Awesome:

https://picasageeks.com/tag/combining-pictures-to-get-the-be...

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-trigger-the-Auto-Awesome-in-G...

I had some great results from that feature, e.g. from big group shots at a party.

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

#96

Post by ktapcnbje »

capableweb wrote: post #65
reaperducer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not directly aimed at you but rather the hilarity of the situation. > only one USB-C port [...] if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed. Absolutely crazy how we ended up accepting supposedly professional devices that work like this. Choose between having power or being able to use a external hard drive (unless you purchase accessories of course). Mea…

I agree that it was outrageous that the MacBook (2015-2019) only had one USB port. However, Apple never called it Pro. The MacBook Pro has at least 2 USB ports.

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

#97

Post by djrogers »

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #60

How about just letting me be able to plug my phone into any laptop and drag and drop my pictures?

You mean like has been possible since the first iPhone? Or am I missing something here - I plug in my iPhone and open the same Image Capture utility that I'd use with any other camera (or SD Card) and import my photos.

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

#98

Post by kitsunesoba »

krrrh wrote: post #55
dartharva wrote: post #31

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…

> 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.

Persistent, multi-device conversation history might not seem valuable at first glance, but I can say that it's saved me a lot of trouble numerous times. In theory one could back up important messages from WhatsApp/Signal as they show up, but the problem is that the vast majority of the messages that end up being valuable at some point down the road are precisely those that seemed inconsequential in the moment. By the time you realize you need them they've been long deleted.

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

#99

Post by mywacaday »

lxgr wrote: post #92
dangwu wrote: post #68

If any Google Photos product people are here... Since you're ending free unlimited photo storage, I badly want a feature that automatically finds all groupings of similar photos and deletes all but the best one (least blurry, most smiles, whatever you decide). Whenever I take photos, I tend to spam the shutter button, so I end up with 3+ photos of anything and everything. I could stay on Google Photos for many, many…

I'd second that, or alternatively just a plan that lets me upload unlimited photos for a monthly fee like Flickr used to do very early on.

Google will give you 2 TB a year for $99, gives me some confidence that it won't go away as easy.

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

#100

Post by grishka »

jonas21 wrote: post #26
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #2

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.

Is there a good reason for the code implementing this to know anything at all about the fact that the world is divided into countries? I don't think there is.
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