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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

#321

Post by systemvoltage »

joncrane wrote: post #318
systemvoltage wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rsync, the command line even, is familiar to vanishingly small slice of the Apple user base. It’s amazing how out of touch developers on HN are from the average Apple user. Completely, utterly, impossibly out of touch with reality. Try to imagine proposing a project like this to the internal teams at Apple and being asked “Who is this for!?”

They don't have to make everyone type in `rsync -aBc foo bar` they just need to expose it in a way that rsync can work with it. Then Apple themselves and developers in the ecosystem can create nice GUIs for the "typical Apple user."

Then why do we care what runs behind the GUI? that's Apple's business.

Can you imagine being the responsible engineer developing this capability and having the burden of a 2 trillion dollar company's reputation if something happens and photos of millions of people are leaked!?

This is what I mean by how people are out of touch with reality.

Any fuckups would destroy Apple forever. They're not going to listen to some armchair rsync bandit.

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

#322

Post by varispeed »

dkonofalski wrote: post #239
varispeed wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in the EU, they are by law required to give you access to your data in a way so that you can achieve this. If this is not available then you can make a complaint and maybe sue them, but that costs money.

Stop spreading this incorrect info. You already have access to this data on both Google Photos and iCloud Photos. The only notable thing is that Apple is offering to perform the transfer for you.

What do you mean? Have you read this?

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

The fact that you can download a .zip file with your photos is not enough.

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

#323

Post by batmaniam »

That's nice, at least everyone can have a secondary backup now. Although this part seems worrying:

> Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo.

What other caveats are there? I don't think people will like the data loss, I would want to keep the originals too.

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

#324

Post by upbeat_general »

systemvoltage wrote: post #321
joncrane wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to make everyone type in `rsync -aBc foo bar` they just need to expose it in a way that rsync can work with it. Then Apple themselves and developers in the ecosystem can create nice GUIs for the "typical Apple user."

Then why do we care what runs behind the GUI? that's Apple's business. Can you imagine being the responsible engineer developing this capability and having the burden of a 2 trillion dollar company's reputation if something happens and photos of millions of people are leaked!? This is what I mean by how people are out of touch with reality. Any fuckups would destroy Apple forever. They're not going to listen to some…

I agree that lots of HN is out of touch but rsync is a very robust and widely used tool.

Furthermore, i don’t see the privacy implications as it’s a client side tool so while it could fuck up downloading I don’t see how it could leak photos. If it were to break, it would just be another piece of buggy apple software of which there are many.

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

#325

Post by kall »

dkonofalski wrote: post #238
kall wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What an ignorant thing to say. You pretend like external hard drives don't exist.

No, i didn‘t. I just pointed out that a full download und upload of a ~500 GB library is not a feasable task for many average users. I‘m also not sure you can even download straight to external storage with iOS safari.

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

#326

Post by alsetmusic »

intrasight wrote: post #272
miles wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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").

I wonder if you can do this using an AWS instance of a mac. And then move the photos to S3.

> I wonder if you can do this using an AWS instance of a mac. And then move the photos to S3.

As I understand it, AWS virtualization is a full Mac client, right? If that's the case, there's no technical limitation that would prevent this.

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

#327

Post by alsetmusic »

intrasight wrote: post #271
sigjuice wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be sweet. I'll mention that with the Synology app, you can have your photos be automatically copied to your Synology. I've been doing that since I got an iPhone, so I don't have the need to download from iCloud. Actually, I don't sync my photos to iCloud since I have my local copy.

> Actually, I don't sync my photos to iCloud since I have my local copy.

Do you have an offsite backup solution for your Synology? I do for all my most important data via Backblaze. I also used to use Arq[0] for Mac, but the UI wasn't very helpful when attempting a restore. This was probably 5y ago. I've been meaning to download and review the latest version.

I still find iCloud backups useful because hey, you can't have too many backups of your photos. I pay, I think, $4.99 / month for whatever tier of storage. But I have multiple devices syncing through it, so I understand if that's not a value-add for one phone.

[0]https://www.arqbackup.com

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

#328

Post by alsetmusic »

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…

> 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.

Pretty much all Apple services roll out in phases. From MacWorld Magazine (last year):

> As part of its staggered roll-out, the iPhone 11 launched in a total of 30 countries simultaneously on 20 September 2019. Customers in Israel had to wait another six days; and then the day after that, another 28 countries were added to the list.

When Steve Jobs introduced new products / services, he would have a slide for the first countries in line, then another slide of the next group. Here's an example:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/52/fa/e1/52fae1ce1b1da1e01341...

This isn't Apple ignoring or favoring anyone. It's Apple starting with what they've got so far.

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

#329

Post by anaganisk »

elcomet wrote: post #295
sullysaas wrote: post #235

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..

Did you try rclone ?

Rclone can't download original quality files from google photos(API limitation)

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

#330

Post by ogre_codes »

varispeed wrote: post #189
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.

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.

They are offering it regions where it’s not required by law as well.
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