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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

#241

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

This exists if you have a Mac. Set Photos to "Download Originals" in the settings and every photo will be downloaded to the "originals" directory in your photo library bundle.

If you want to get your photos out of iCloud but not using Photos, there’s a neat cross-platform Python CLI tool called icloudpd[0]. It uses iCloud API, supports 2FA, and has a variety of options to control what’s downloaded (e.g., by album).

It helped me free up iCloud storage without filling up my SSD (which is what would’ve happened if I synced the whole library using Photos). I pointed icloudpd to one massive album with random Filmic footage, which I then transferred to external storage. Download took multiple runs due to size and network interruptions, thankfully the tool avoids redownloading already completed items.

[0] https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

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

#242

I have 992GB of photos stored in Google Photos and I desperately want something to transfer all of them FROM Google Photos to any other service. Google Takeout fails to export all of my photos..

I have 400GB in Google Photos, and I am able to use Google Takeout to download them as multiple archives. I try to back them every 1/2 years on a hard drive.

Since I assume you are a Google One user. Maybe contact support and share your issue?

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

#243
post #194

Does rclone[1] interface with iCloud Photos ? It works just fine with google photos[2] ... Without installing rclone and without using any of your own bandwidth, you should be able to: ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah gphotos:/blah Or maybe you just want to keep a copy in your rsync.net account: ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah /your/dir/tree [1] https://rclone.org [2] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

If they have a Mac, then yes. You can enable download of all full-resolution photos from iCloud to a Photos library which can be stored anywhere and is stored in a standard directory structure.

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

#244
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

Although I do consider "digital feudalism" a legitimate risk, I don't think this is a good example. An increasing number of people don't have laptops but instead just phones and game consoles, so so have no access to normal data-centric affordances.

There is a real risk but it's not that different from the pre cloud era: that of proprietary formats. Google Docs itself is proprietary (if you map the Google Drive files to your local filesystem in the style of Dropbox the actual local data store locally is just a URI). It's worse, but not a huge amount worse than having your files be a proprietary blob, say a Word file.

And there are of course innumerable services that have data that never leaves the cloud from Facebook at one extreme to various services such as Gantt charts that aren't downloadable in any meaningful way.

But as I said I don't think this one case is a good example: In the case of Apple's stuff, I can keep it all current on my laptop: just tell photos, iCloud files, music etc to keep a complete copy on the local disk (i.e. don't treat it as a chache) and then back up normally. Music, photos, etc are stored in normal files (JPEG and mp3). My IMAP client downloads everything (messages and attachments) so if I were willing to use iCloud mail or gmail everything would be backed up; ditto for my calendars and address book. This is the same for many other cloud providers like Dropbox.

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. At what point do you become compelled to start transforming your web application into an open protocol?

Certainly any company that relies on “safe harbor” style protections or sells online services (alone or bundled with software) as a subscription should be required to fully open and document the protocol.

But most SaaS companies don’t make protocols, they make web applications. So I’m not really sure what’s implied by these trivial-to-implement protocols. Having a functional and well documented API isn’t a protocol. An open protocol would be more like a situation where any vendor could implement an “iCloud service”, and any “iCloud client” could connect to any vendors service.

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

#246
post #129
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, wasn't this mandatory in EU? Something related to GDPR?

Yes, data portability is a requirement in the GDPR. You should not be locked in to a service just because they have your data.

Portability, yes, but does it require portability to another specific service? I understand being able to get your data out of a platform, but I don’t see a requirement that a given entity provide explicit transfer to another.

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

#248
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's the "lets you" part that ticks me off. That's the reason I have both Google Photos upload and Dropbox Upload enabled. Don't want to wake up one time to find out my photos are gone because some algo had a bad day.

You've always been "allowed" to move your photos from Apple Photos to Google Photos. The difference here is that Apple is doing it for you .

Oh. Well, my dislike for the big tech lock-in solutions is more general in nature. Thanks for clearing it up.

Curious, what happens if Apple locks your account (not in their ecosystem but M1 got me apple-curious ;)? Can you still export you're data, photos?

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. At what point do you become compelled to start transforming your web application into an open protocol?

I think smaller companies tend to have the most open protocols (to the point that it almost becomes a security risk) because they don't have resources to work on unnecessary obfuscation. The protocols might not be documented anywhere but if a website is able to access a backend endpoint then someone else will be able to access that endpoint too.

Nothing in the parent comment says anything about requiring good documentation or 100% backwards compatibility.

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

#250
post #176
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

But you could always do this. Apple seems to go a step further and does this on your behalf. I think that’s newsworthy.

I still can't insert a USB drive into an iPad without hassle.
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