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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

#101
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon Google has always charged for storage in Google Photos - it's part of your "Google Drive" storage quota. They do give you 10GB free though, which can be substantial for a lot of folks.

There was a free tier of photos and videos under a certain resolution which didn't count towards your storage which they're removing.

I was under the impression that was only for Pixel phone owners - I suppose I was mistaken!

Although low resolution image uploads doesn't seem very useful for most people. The point of cloud storage is peace of mind to keep your data safe... and to me that implies the original photos not reduced resolution photos.

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

#103
post #92
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.

Honestly, though, it's still a bad experience browsing other search-based tags and having to wade through all these dupes. I'd rather a clean way of just removing them at the source.

Possibly a compromise could be an auto-collapse function where Photos shows it as a stack with the AI-proposed best pick on top, and an option to fan out and make your own judgment. That doesn't on its own fix the storage side, but it would be a small step from there to a one-click "trash everything from this stack other than the featured item.

Apple kind of does this with live photos, but it would be nice to have GPhotos able to figure it out as well after the fact, since we've all been doing the "take many pics of it just in case" thing since forever.

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

#104
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arbit…

Easy migration to a competitor could hurt their customer retention.

Why offer it at all then? At least in Europe the GDPR requires direct transfer of your data to a competitor where technically possible.

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

#105
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 don't know whether you're on iOS, but if you are, the app on the app store called "Gemini" has been a game-changer for me in this regard.

Is this the one? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/...

(There are a lot of "Gemini" bitcoin apps, apparently...)

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

#106
post #63

While it's good that this is finally being provided, it's still somewhat amazing that there isn't any documented API to interact with iCloud. One can of course, on Apple hardware, use apple proprietary APIs to do some things. Or one can use the iCloudJs stuff from a webpage. But there's not an official/documented way to, say, write a program that runs on a Linux server to mirror photos in iCloud to disk (or access an…

If they did have official APIs, that would mean that someone would eventually make use of them to make an Android client. And that would be absolutely unacceptable. /s

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

#107

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?

> Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload?

I'm of the (perhaps cynical) view that Apple is only doing this to satisfy their legal obligations under the GDPR, and GDPR requires direct transfer.

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

#109
post #36

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…

It's the first part of the Data Transfer Project - an initiative between major online service providers to provide an easy way to transfer data between their services.

Ah, easing of travel restrictions often accompanies a diplomatic thaw.
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