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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

#131

Post by lostlogin »

krrrh wrote: post #71
dangwu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting, and it's the first I've heard of the project. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Apple has yet released the adaptors to the open source project [1]. As much as I'm not interested in having Apple copy my photos to Google, I am very interested in scripting my own offline backups without having to make space for Photos.app to store all my photos on my laptop's SSD. Hopefully the adaptors are added t…

Once your library gets large, local storage is just too hard and expensive on a laptop. Photos.app seems to hate using external or network drives.

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

#132

Post by lostlogin »

crooked-v wrote: post #75
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…

Library view, All Photos, then click and shift-click to select a range of photos, File -> Export Unmodified Original. That way you can export a chunk at a time, as long as you keep track of which ones you stopped at for each batch.

But if your library is mostly on the cloud it gets worse.

And how is this the best solution in 2021?

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

#133

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

vineyardmike wrote: post #111
grishka wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet every code implementation exists in some country bound by laws.

So we can't accept a premise that these are countries that mandate such transfers, because not all of them do. And we can't accept a premise that these are countries that all have the same laws, because not all of them do. And we can't accept a premise that these are the countries whose laws make doing this easy, because many other countries place no obstacles whatsoever. So what other law thing should we be thinking of?

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

#134

Post by wave100 »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #98
krrrh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure if this is a feature I got grandfathered into, but I've got WhatsApp set to back my messages up to Google Drive every week. On my Android phone, the setting is in settings -> chats -> chat backup.

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

#135

Post by jonas21 »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #56
jonas21 wrote: 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…

If I had to guess, I'd say that Apple and Google probably have a contract that covers how this transfer takes place, and it takes some amount of effort from their legal teams to ensure that it's a valid contract that complies with the laws of each jurisdiction. As a result, they started with the highest-value jurisdictions like the US and EU first.

Regarding Liechtenstein, it is (along with Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland) part of the European Single Market [1] via trade agreements with the EU, so it's possible that it was trivial to adapt whatever contract they were using in the EU to cover them as well. I don't think it's a coincidence that all 4 are on the list -- but again, this is just a guess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market

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

#136

Post by sigjuice »

reaperducer wrote: post #21
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…

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…

Easy bulk downloads to the desktop (and hopefully to any attached external drive) would give me real peace of mind. Right now, I am a bit nervous with iCloud being the only full copy of my photos. None of my computers have enough storage to hold all my photos.

It would be even cooler if my Synology could download all my photos directly from iCloud.

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

#137

Post by jcomis »

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…

Or please allow me to re-upload previously uploaded "high quality" free photos to "original quality" once I pay. After years of being a paid customer I have still not found a way to do this.

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

#138

Post by sigjuice »

enos_feedler wrote: post #128
baby wrote: post #126

I really really hate how locked I am on the products I own... I pay for Apple music yet I can't play it on my Google home. I use Google maps yet in some apps it forces me to use Apple maps (even though I don't have it installed). I use Google photos, which I can't use to manage my photos in the native way that Apple photos do it. Airdrop only works between Apple devices. I use Chrome and yet some apps will just open…

At least being able to move your photos out of Apple Photos is a step towards not locking you into Apple's ecosystem. I don't think the ultimate goal is removing lock in completely. It's a fools errand to try and defeat it. The goal should be to free you from being locked into a company that takes it too far. This creates free choice and a market opportunity for another business to serve people like you. Also .. I th…

So far, Apple only allows changing the default web browser or email app.

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

#139

Post by nvrspyx »

grishka wrote: post #106
codys wrote: 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

Are you sure you meant to include that "/s"?

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

#140

Post by aceazzameen »

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…

You just reminded how the old Android camera app (maybe Samsung?) used to have a "best" mode. Snap some photos, review the best one(s) and only commit to saving your choices.

It was something that could have probably used a UX refresh, but was instead removed entirely in future phones.

I'd love if cloud services implemented something similar.

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