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iCloud Photos Downloader

github.com

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Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#31

Post by mmh0000 »

I run this periodically from a little shell script; I "should" automate it, but time is scarce.

  ⟩ cat ~/bin/icloud_download
  #!/bin/bash
  mkdir "$(pwd)"/{photos,cookies} 2> /dev/null
  
  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" ]]; then
      echo "need env ICLOUD_USERNAME"
      exit 1
  fi
  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" ]]; then
      echo "need env ICLOUD_PASSWORD"
      exit 1
  fi
  
  podman container run -it --rm --name icloud \
      -v $(pwd)/photos:/data \
      -v $(pwd)/cookies:/cookies \
      -e TZ=America/Boise \
      icloudpd/icloudpd:latest \
      icloudpd --directory /data \
      --cookie-directory /cookies \
      --folder-structure {:%Y/%Y-%m-%d} \
      --username "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" \
      --password "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" \
      --size original

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#34

Post by punnerud »

thierryzoller wrote: post #30
punnerud wrote: post #28

You know you only need to do a GDPR request to Apple (dedicated page), select images and you get a download link after a few hours

For those in the EU only ?

Believe it work for everyone? I am located in Oslo/Norway, so can’t check if it does not apply everywhere.

Only need to go to this page to do the request https://privacy.apple.com/

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#35

Post by rgovostes »

My concern with backing up iCloud Photos with anything but Apple Photos is that there are some proprietary formats like Live Photos and slow mo video for which exports are lossy. Also, Apple Photos stores all edits non-destructively, so 'flattening' the edits into a single file for export is also a lossy operation.

It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#36

Post by cortesoft »

netsharc wrote: post #15
dwayne_dibley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immich is probably the best option

I'm sure grandparent meant to modify it so they'd just have to click "Backup to cloud" on their iPhone and instead of the iPhone sending their files to Apple's servers, it sends them to a local backup server...

Immich can get pretty close to that experience, with the iPhone app and a local immich instance.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#37

Post by CharlesW »

Nextgrid wrote: post #22
kccqzy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true. On any Mac or iPhone you can choose the iCloud Photo Library storage option to download all instead of letting the system optimize the storage. And if you turn off iCloud Photo Library, it will also try to download it all. I know this because I stopped using iCloud Photo Library and that was how I got all my photos downloaded.

Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library - you're in for an endless game of spinners (it does some network IO on the main thread), "not responding" and memory leaks. But hey at least we've got Liquid (gl)ass now.

> Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs…

I use Photos for macOS daily and I've never run into a bug with my 50K+ photos library. (To be fair, Photos doesn't do that much, and I use it more as a master catalog with Aperture's spiritual successor Nitro.)

> …and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library…

Not sure why you would need luck to copy the "Originals" folder from the library package.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#38

Post by lostlogin »

rgovostes wrote: post #35

My concern with backing up iCloud Photos with anything but Apple Photos is that there are some proprietary formats like Live Photos and slow mo video for which exports are lossy. Also, Apple Photos stores all edits non-destructively, so 'flattening' the edits into a single file for export is also a lossy operation. It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized sto…

Could the first obvious improvement please be its speed? My god. The local Time Machine backup is slower on a 10gb network than Backblaze over the Internet. It isn’t even close.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#39

Post by ireadmevs »

reddalo wrote: post #21
reconnecting wrote: post #2

Surprisingly, there is no official way to download all (400 Gb) photos from iCloud. Here is an open-source command-line tool to download all your iCloud photos.

Technically, there is: users of the European Union can get a full export of all data that Apple has about them, including all the stored photos. It can be requested from here: https://privacy.apple.com/

How does the archive they provide look like? Many zip files? I would like to retrieve them and offload to another storage service but I don’t have local storage enough to hold all of it at the same time, unpack and then reupload. I would need to do it in stages.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#40

Post by koolba »

mmh0000 wrote: post #31

I run this periodically from a little shell script; I "should" automate it, but time is scarce. ⟩ cat ~/bin/icloud_download #!/bin/bash mkdir "$(pwd)"/{photos,cookies} 2> /dev/null if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" ]]; then echo "need env ICLOUD_USERNAME" exit 1 fi if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" ]]; then echo "need env ICLOUD_PASSWORD" exit 1 fi podman container run -it --rm --name icloud \ -v $(pwd)/photos:/data \ -v $(p…

> icloudpd/icloudpd:latest

Passing your raw iCloud creds into the unverified latest tag is fine until it’s not. Better to pin to a specific tag or hash.

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