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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

#181

Just give us a ‘download all’ button with the ability to resume in the event of a failure. RSync has been around for a long time why reinvent the wheel for every different service. Welcome to Modern tech - constantly reinventing (square) wheel

I would also like this button, but I would not be surprised if a good chunk of users have an icloud photo library so large that none of their apple devices could fit it in it's (underspeced) storage.

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

#182
They don't do any favour. They are supposed to allow it by law because of GDPR. If GDPR was not passed, I personally doubt Apple would do anything. They should allow export not only to Google Photos but also for yourself to download in a way that you could import it to any other photo storage service.

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

#183
post #144

It is a bit sad to see something as simple as "you can now take your photos and put them where you want" become a newsworthy article. This is yet another demonstration that Digital Feudalism is alive and well, and just like its ancestor, we need to get rid of it by empowering people to be their own self

They were required to do this by law in the EU.

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

#184
post #155
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.

Workaround: install the Google Opinion Rewards app which is even available on iPhone. It will ask you survey questions about places you have recently visited. (Yes, it tracks you). Over the course of a year, you can earn $20 in "virtual" money which can then be used to purchase the 100GB/year plan.

You can (I do) earn that much without location sharing. But I've been doing it for a long time so I seem to get more surveys than I did at first. Looking at my history, I average just shy of 1.75/month.

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

#185
post #70

Lol two months ago I moved about 80GB of photos from iCloud to Google and it was an absolute nightmare. Nothing worked correctly through the entire collection.

Imagine a service which properly integrated your phone camera (such that messaging etc worked nicely) had a desktop app and allowed network storage and backup. Have I just missed this application?

I use iPhone + Apple’s Photos app on MacOS for this, but I also include Dropbox for backing up directly from the phone and from any SD cards from other cameras. I also make a backup copy of Dropbox myself.

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

#186

Mind you, Google's free plan gives only 15GB space. Purchasing larger space requires unnecessary monthly expense. Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution.

Google's storage plans start at $19.99/year for 100GB. For less than a cup of coffee every month I'm able to back up my photos wherever I am, search across photos, share them easily with iOS and Android users, easily buy larger prints and photo books.

Yes, there's the fact that Google scans photos. I personally find it really useful to search for an object or face in Google Photos that other services just don't do as well.

>Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution

Well of course that's true. Nothing will beat owning a physical copy of your files in terms of backups/reliability in the worst cases. But you can always do both. Upload to the cloud and perform periodic account takeouts of your photos and store them to disk.

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

#187

They don't do any favour. They are supposed to allow it by law because of GDPR. If GDPR was not passed, I personally doubt Apple would do anything. They should allow export not only to Google Photos but also for yourself to download in a way that you could import it to any other photo storage service.

How are they obligated by GDPR to support server side data transfer to Google in particular? My understanding is that they are only required to make it possible for you to download your data so that you can upload it elsewhere if you'd like to.

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

#188
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.

Search is a mixed bag: Google configured it with low thresholds and was resistant to adding an error correction mechanism, so e.g. “cat” would match my dog and there was nothing I could do about it.

The main thing, however, is the social features. iCloud just works and works well. Google Photos UI was really clunky and notifications weren't reliable so I'd miss comments from relatives.

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

#189
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.

This is quite elaborately dishonest as data portability is one of the requirements of GDPR that came to life in 2018. It's not like suddenly those giants decided to be good companies and allowed data transfer between services. It looks like they use it as a PR piece and at the same time trying to ensure that users won't flock to competition that has not signed to their thing.

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

#190
post #144

It is a bit sad to see something as simple as "you can now take your photos and put them where you want" become a newsworthy article. This is yet another demonstration that Digital Feudalism is alive and well, and just like its ancestor, we need to get rid of it by empowering people to be their own self

force protocols to be open would just about do it. People would trivially write cross-service applications on top and we could have an internet where people can freely move data around. Apple and Google would be delegated to the backend and users could choose the clients they want. It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. We're stuck in the 19th century railroad industry.

http was open once and technically it is open now. Soon the complexity of the protocol will allow only the major corporations to implement it (and it is unclear whether that complexity helps most people).
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