This great. I want to switch to android but the only thing stopping me is eight years of photos. No more.
If your end goal is to move the photos to Google photos have a look at https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10502587?sjid=13067...
iCloud Photos Downloader
51–60 of 257 posts
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#52My 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…
In my experience migrating to another provider from iCloud, this hasn’t been a significant issue. Live Photos in particular are not really proprietary in the sense that they’re implemented in an extremely simple way that basically every photo tool understands. ~~Slow motion videos are also not proprietary, they’re just a plain video file.~~ <<< edit: I think I’m wrong about slow motion
> Slow motion videos are also not proprietary, they’re just a plain video file.
I haven't looked into the implementation details, but Photos lets you adjust the section of the video that is played back in slow motion. I thought if you share a slow-mo video, it gets re-encoded to bake this in (i.e., one second at 240fps gets exported as four seconds at 60fps).
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#53My 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.
[deleted]
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#54You need an extra tool to download your own photos? That's... not a basic feature? I'm always surprised what kind of antifeatures people in Apple land are willing to accept and still use those things...
You absolutely can download your photos, just not via command line like this project enables.
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#55You need an extra tool to download your own photos? That's... not a basic feature? I'm always surprised what kind of antifeatures people in Apple land are willing to accept and still use those things...
You do not need an extra tool to download your photos. This one runs from the command line, though.
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#56why not use rclone
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#57You need an extra tool to download your own photos? That's... not a basic feature? I'm always surprised what kind of antifeatures people in Apple land are willing to accept and still use those things...
As is pointed out elsewhere in the thread, there are at three official ways to download your own photos. This complements those.
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#58Earlier 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.
+1 to this method. After optimise storage is disabled on the Mac, wait for all photos to download. Then, open the photos library bundle and you'll see every photo there, full res. Copy them wherever you like. Also, if you leave optimise storage disabled and continue to use Photos, every photo will be cloned in any local or cloud backups of your machine. This strategy creates additional photo redundancy separate from…
Or use the great osxphotos tool that works with Apple Photo’s SQLite database to let you manage all the photos in your library.
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 to this method. After optimise storage is disabled on the Mac, wait for all photos to download. Then, open the photos library bundle and you'll see every photo there, full res. Copy them wherever you like. Also, if you leave optimise storage disabled and continue to use Photos, every photo will be cloned in any local or cloud backups of your machine. This strategy creates additional photo redundancy separate from…
This was my strategy too, but with a disgusting script which quit photos.app, rsync the photo library to a network share, then reopened photos.app so that it kept downloading from iCloud. Not sure if the open/close is required, but I didn’t want to find out.
I don’t fully trust iCloud Drive / Photos therefore I use FSViewer to download all photos from my iOS device du jour (making sure to keep the HEIF formats), this way I get the Edited (slo-mo, live, portrait, usw) and pristine versions as Jobs intended. All kidding aside, after the gray area gate of 2017-2021 I had to find a more reliable backup workflow. As of today I only use iCloud Drive / Photos to extract some RAW photos that for some reason some picky apps don’t save to the photo album (looking at you ProCam 8.0). I made several tests including hash comparisons and imagemagick diffs and I am quite pleased.
Re: iCloud Photos Downloader
#60Surprisingly, 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.
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.
Okay, and if there are 300 or 500 GB of photos, how do you synchronise them with your iPhone?