On this topic...anyone know the best way to export an entire iCloud Photo Library at full resolution?
There is an export service that returns a archive
Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
161–170 of 192 posts
Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Differential backups or any sort of versioning seemed like one of the most obvious culprits (that and or total redundant storage to preserve the file) but the issue with all of this is it’s entirely opaque. Ultimately you’re increasingly tethered to some service for your storage that you pay for periodically based on total storage yet you have little-to-no information how to best optimize that storage if you want to…
>So as a consumer, do I just wave my hands and keep throwing more and more money at the problem, Yes. I can go and buy 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive or 2TB of Google Drive for less than a Franklin a year, and most people won't even need 1TB let alone 2TB. Both Microsoft and Google also offer 100GB plans for a Jackson a year, which is what I purchase myself. The average person can get by paying a Washington per month to A…
And if you invest that $100 at 7% that becomes after x years...
,End Balance after x years, 4% per year
10, 1,578.36, 63.13
15, 2,788.81, 111.55
30, 10,207.30, 408.29
40, 21,460.96, 858.44
Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#163Photos.app doesn't show file size… so I thought, why not build a little Photos.app extension or a separate app that queries for large files? Turns out that the API doesn't expose "file size", at least I didn't find a straight-forward way. I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video,…
On top of that, something I still haven't looked into the details on: when you import RAW+JPG photos, the "original" can be set to either one. You can import and make some edits without realizing which is being used unless you go through the menus. So my freshly imported pic could be 5MB or 50MB despite just being a single thumbnail in the library.
Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#164Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
"640KB is more than anyone will ever need" It's a little absurd to think people don't need more than 2TB - especially on HN. Gamers will likely have 2TB in games alone, videographers often have many TBs of videos and photos from weddings and events in their life, many that care about health may have a few TB in genomic data mirrored on their computers to analyze, etc. I would imagine it's hard to find people that wou…
> Gamers will likely have 2TB in games alone If I were to install all the games on my steam account it would be many hundreds of terabytes of total storage. In the end I have about a terabyte of games on my computer. And of that 0 bytes are in my cloud storage. I've been an amateur photographer for over 15 years. I tend to curate the photos I keep, largely because I don't need 20+ pictures of the same scene. Its more…
You could argue all your games are in the cloud since of the hundreds of terabytes of games you have, you're only keeping 1TB of them on the computer.
Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#166Interesting, also, Apple should make a mid-tier of iCloud. If they had a 500gb (or 400 or whatever) they could have gotten this guy to pay more.
Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#167Photos.app doesn't show file size… so I thought, why not build a little Photos.app extension or a separate app that queries for large files? Turns out that the API doesn't expose "file size", at least I didn't find a straight-forward way. I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video,…
> I think that all "photos" or "videos" are just a view of the underlying "photo or video object". If you crop a video, the full-size video will remain. Only if you export the video, it will be cropped and the smaller file size will manifest. Yup, the Photos app keeps the unmodified original file, and then any edits/crops are stored separately. You can always revert to the original file and redo your edits. So they m…
It’s (much) more complicated than that. HEIC format allows multiple “frames” to be stored in the container, each one derived from the source (or each other). So there may literally be just one file but it has (algorithmically) the definition for generating (losslessly) the other files, too. So there isn’t/wouldn’t be even a separate “smaller copy” at all as it is generated on-the-fly.
Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#168Interesting, also, Apple should make a mid-tier of iCloud. If they had a 500gb (or 400 or whatever) they could have gotten this guy to pay more.
At the cost of many others not buying the more expensive plan because it was their only option.
Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#169Interesting article. I have my own problem, that caused me to have to upgrade my iCloud plan, and thus may not be a high priority fix for Apple. If you shoot RAW+JPEG (not a super-rare thing to do, for photo enthusiasts) then Apple Photos links the two images. Which is useful, rather than having a bunch of kinda-duplicates littering your library you can easily toggle between RAW and JPEG. But this combining, along wi…
Not in your situation at this point, but as a photo nerd I will eventually be so I took to Google. > Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library. Apparently when you File/Export Unmodified Originals it will export the RAW+HEIC and a sepa…
> it's clearly not prioritized because it helps funnel people into higher iCloud tier
Which would be annoying by itself. But then iCloud has an arbitrary limit of 2TB as well, which does not seem to be able to be increased.
Re: Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks promising - will look into it!
So it appears you can conveniently query the DB for filename (+directory), UUID, and (original) file size. But I can't find a good way of opening a Photo by filename or UUID. After all, the file might not be present locally, so opening it should go through the Photos.app. But once you call AppleScript to open the file, you might as well use the AppleScript to comb through the database like the script I linked to earl…
Check out this which I believe has that feature: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos