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iCloud Photos Downloader

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Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#141

Post by gerdemb »

HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it.

One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up flattening or partially reconstructing that on restore.

The approach I took was to treat Photos as the source of truth and verify restored items against it, rather than assuming filesystem metadata is enough. As far as I know, this is the only tool that restores albums and correctly round-trips all Photos item types while preserving location data, creation dates, and modification dates when restoring back into Photos.

Project page is here if it’s useful: https://photosbackup.app/

Happy to explain details if anyone’s curious — there are a lot of sharp edges in Photos once you go beyond “export originals”.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#142

Post by rykc »

Wish I’d seen this 3 days ago. Needed to backup our Shared Library and did the following (about 10K photos/videos at 300gb, had enough space so full downloaded to MacBook, not optimize. 1. Repair iPhoto library, (Wait 24 hrs to re-sync to iCloud) - initially looks like it moved all photos to personal. 2. Select small chunks, by year worked well enough - selecting All gave me the spinning ball. Then export unmodified to external hdd into folders organized by year. 3. Moved entire photo library file to another external hdd. 4. Open iPhoto and select external hdd library as primary library, let it re-sync to iCloud (Wait 24 hrs). iPhoto now running off external HDD library and I’ll backup to separate external HDD monthly. Repair function and wired Ethernet connection were biggest game changers to previous attempts.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#143

Post by SSLy »

gerdemb wrote: post #141

HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it. One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up…

have you looked at parachute backup? they also boast ability to backup the more mercurial types of iPhotos data.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#144

Post by ivanjermakov »

kimos wrote: post #136
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #116

I’ve been using usbmuxd+ifuse to copy the photo files straight from the phone. No need to wait for an upload/download to some remote server, just a direct cable from the phone to my computer. I get the original files, and can even move (instead of copy) to clear up the phone.

This works on any iPhone? It mounts the non-privileged DCIM folder or whatever over USB to somewhere on your filesystem? With write access?

Yes, yes, no.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Transferring_data

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#145

Post by toomuchtodo »

gerdemb wrote: post #141

HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it. One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up…

Thanks for commenting, do you support S3 compatible targets? Backblaze B2, for example.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#146

Post by d1l »

Fuck, my wife got a notice that she would have to increase her iCloud storage so last week began the process of ordering a backup of all her pictures so I could get them off iCloud and organized on some drives at home. We got 12 zips of the pictures along with csv's and some metadata, and I literally just finished iterating on the script to sort them into year-based folders and convert all the HEIC shit into JPG. It's running literally right now.

Guess I should've searched harder!

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#147

Post by open_ »

gerdemb wrote: post #141

HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it. One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up…

My current process for offloading photos off the iPhone is to copy them in subsequent batches of '0-9999' from the 'Image Capture' app.

This is because I usually have far more than 10K photos and apple starts renaming the files after 9999 as 00001(1) for the rest. This is pretty undesirable.

Is there a way for me to export unmodified raw/jpeg/live/videos off the iphone to an external drive without a macbook with a large enough ssd, and wanting to use icloud as an intermediate bottleneck?

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#148

Post by giancarlostoro »

gerdemb wrote: post #141

HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it. One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up…

I have taken time to slowly extract photos from old androids and its such a nightmare, and if you cant get a meaningful interface to load you have to resort to tooling that scrapes the whole drive and hope it grabs everything.

Re: iCloud Photos Downloader

#150

Post by giancarlostoro »

open_ wrote: post #147
gerdemb wrote: post #141

HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it. One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up…

My current process for offloading photos off the iPhone is to copy them in subsequent batches of '0-9999' from the 'Image Capture' app. This is because I usually have far more than 10K photos and apple starts renaming the files after 9999 as 00001(1) for the rest. This is pretty undesirable. Is there a way for me to export unmodified raw/jpeg/live/videos off the iphone to an external drive without a macbook with a la…

I did it on Linux once I extracted them all as-is in the strange storage way that iOS stores them but I dont recall steps to make it mount the drive.
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