21 ms·

Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

558 points by brunoluiz 6y ago

BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
This article is a little weird. The title is actually "Transfer a copy of your iCloud Photos collection to another service" but then the small print says "...to Google Photos." It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet? It also only allows customers from a small fraction of countries to use this, which I really don't get. Maybe those are all the places iCloud Photos and Google Photos are currently available together? But I don't get that either.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet? Considering the fourth word of the second paragraph is "initially," I think you're correct — this is a work in progress. 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, and it took me almost a week to make a local backup of my wife's iCloud photos.
  - miles 6y ago
    > 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").
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      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"). Unfortunately, that wouldn't work for my wife's situation. Her computer is one of those MacBooks with a 256GB drive, and only one USB-C port. So the amount of data stored in her iCloud photos would easily overload her drive, and if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed. I'm not interested in buying a hub for a one-off operation. I tried afp:// and smb:// mounting Photos libraries on large drives on other machines on the LAN, then downloading the photos to those, but that turned out to be excruciatingly slow, and very unreliable.
      - capableweb 6y ago
        This is not directly aimed at you but rather the hilarity of the situation. > only one USB-C port [...] if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed. Absolutely crazy how we ended up accepting supposedly professional devices that work like this. Choose between having power or being able to use a external hard drive (unless you purchase accessories of course). Mean while, desktop computers are built to be customizable in every single way.
        ktapcnbje 6y ago
        I agree that it was outrageous that the MacBook (2015-2019) only had one USB port. However, Apple never called it Pro. The MacBook Pro has at least 2 USB ports.
        capableweb 6y ago
        > However, Apple never called it Pro. I think in the marketing material, Apple tends to call everything they do "for professionals", not just the line of hardware with "Pro" in its name.
        reaperducer 6y ago
        No, this was just a plain consumer-level MacBook, sold alongside both the Pro and the Air line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2015–2019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2015–2019)
        lupire 6y ago
        A laptop can be customized with accessories, same as a desktop can.
      - crooked-v 6y ago
        Library view, All Photos, then click and shift-click to select a range of photos, File -> Export Unmodified Original. That way you can export a chunk at a time, as long as you keep track of which ones you stopped at for each batch.
    - intrasight 6y ago
      I wonder if you can do this using an AWS instance of a mac. And then move the photos to S3.
      - alsetmusic 6y ago
        > 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.
  - sigjuice 6y ago
    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.
    - intrasight 6y ago
      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.
      - alsetmusic 6y ago
        > 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 https://www.arqbackup.com
    - kalleboo 6y ago
      I run this docker container on my Synology to have it download a backup of my iCloud Photo Library https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/icloudpd/icloudpd/ https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/icloudpd/icloudpd/ https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
  - enra 6y ago
    You can do this with the Windows iCloud app. Just downloaded 7000 photos through it.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  It'll be countries where Apple is facing anti-trust complaints.
- jonas21 6y ago
  Yeah, just a small fraction of countries, like the United States and the European Union. I'm sure nobody cares about those places.
  - jakemal 6y ago
    Yes, only a billion people in the wealthiest countries in the world who are most likely to own an Apple device.
    - BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
      You don't think that more people use Apple iCloud in Japan or India (total population 1.5 billion) than in Liechtenstein (total population approximately 0)?
      - umeshunni 6y ago
        Liechtenstein is a part of the EU and is subject to the same regulations as the rest of the EU. Launching a product in Japan or India require an entirely new set of legal and regulatory work.
        BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
        > Liechtenstein is a part of the EU No it isn't, which is why Apple specifically calls it out when they also have an entry for "the European Union". Economic Area, yes, Union, no. And Switzerland is part of neither and has their own data regulation separate from the GDPR.
        robotresearcher 6y ago
        There is a single trade framework that contains them all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market
  - BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  The actual transfer page also says "Choose where you’d like to transfer your photos:" and has a dropdown titled "Select destination" There's nothing but Google Photos to choose from now, but the intent is definitely to support other services.
- dangwu 6y ago
  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.
  - krrrh 6y ago
    That's interesting, and it's the first I've heard of the project. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Apple has yet released the adaptors to the open source project [1]. As much as I'm not interested in having Apple copy my photos to Google, I am very interested in scripting my own offline backups without having to make space for Photos.app to store all my photos on my laptop's SSD. Hopefully the adaptors are added to the project soon. [1] https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/extensions/data-transfer https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/...
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      Once your library gets large, local storage is just too hard and expensive on a laptop. Photos.app seems to hate using external or network drives.
      - spullara 6y ago
        I've been using it on an external drive for ages. What kinds of issues have you run into?
      - beamatronic 6y ago
        I would really like to know if the M1 chip helps this in any regard.
      - PhilosAccnting 6y ago
        Yes, but self-made NAS is always an option, and in this case I'd almost say an ideal for when the balance of trust leans away from unnamed organizations holding your information.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
msh 6y ago
Then we are only missing google providing the same service! (I know of google takeout, which is great but not the same as this)
- 1f60c 6y ago
  Yup. For those of us with slow WiFi, Google Takeout is basically unusable.
  - slaymaker1907 6y ago
    If you really want to get those files, you could try using a VM on a fast network (not sure which cloud offering would be best for this in terms of bandwidth cost). This is not ideal at all, just suggesting a trick I've used in the past as a workaround for big downloads on an unreliable network. Obviously Google should just improve their service.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    FWIW, you can do a takeout to another service like OneDrive or another Google Drive account and use their clients to sync. You can probably use wget to download in a more stable way, too.
  - kuyan 6y ago
    I've had the same experience. The worst part is that you can only retry a download of a Google Takeout archive so many times before it locks you out, and you have to wait a day or so for a new takeout...
- VladimirGolovin 6y ago
  Takeout is NOT great, at least in my case. I never once managed to fully download my photo archive, despite my repeated attempts. I gave up, so my current "strategy" for keeping my photos safe is "Never ever do anything that might make Google algorithms think that I'm violating their ToS".
  - jkingsman 6y ago
cube2222 6y ago
Is there similar functionality for the other way around? So basically a simple migration from Google Photos to iCloud?
- smoldesu 6y ago
  This should be what you're looking for: https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Takeout is table stakes for Google’s position in the market. They really need to better support 3rd parties making a Takeout request on behalf of a user, and those services then retrieving the Takeout bundle for ingestion.
    - slaymaker1907 6y ago
      But what about the privacy, the PRIVACY! /s I'm 100% sure that's the excuse they will give, but I don't think this is a huge problem as long as there is a big scary box about what allowing an app to use Takeout means (a scarier box than just normal permissions, probably lots of red and exclamation points).
  - nlgfd 6y ago
    nah it's not the same - I migrated from Google Photos to OneDrive last month and while it did migrate everything to OneDrive for me, it put everything into little 10GB .zips that I had to download, extract, re-upload.
- asadlionpk 6y ago
  I would love that as I have to move my family from Google to iCloud.
ncann 6y ago
A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon, but it's still miles better than iCloud Photos in almost everything. From search, to timeline overview, to seamless integration with my Chromecast, to automatic face tagging, to editing.
- janlaureys 6y ago
  Anecdotal annoyance with automatic face tagging: Old dog and new dog look very similar. Google keeps tagging my new dog as if he were my old dog and I haven't found a way to fix that without manually going through every single picture and untagging/retagging.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    I'm just amazed these services have face tagging for dogs, and that you consider it so obvious that you feel like complaining about it.
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      If it's broken, then it's broken. It doesn't matter how futuristic and awesome it is.
      - ghostpepper 6y ago
        Yep, in this case it sounds like “awesome futuristic idea poorly implemented” is worse than not having the feature. Adding a simple toggle to disable it (or even better, a blacklist of tags to never auto-add) would be the best compromise.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      I uploaded a 4D obstetric ultrasound to get rid of the CD. Photos.app tagged it as my child. That blew my mind.
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    You can manually go and say "this is my new dog" to improve the tagging.
airhead969 6y ago
Doesn't the Google Photo app do this already without waiting? Is there a use-case for this?
- navanchauhan 6y ago
  If I understand correctly, this directly transfers data from Apple’s server to theirs. You don’t need to even install their app.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Seems like a one-time export, unless I'm wrong. CloudHQ used to synchronize content between clouds but they seem to have fewer features these days.
LegitShady 6y ago
I migrated away from Google Cloud storage this year given their announcement. The Microsoft office 365 family deal made at more sense. I can't see myself using Google cloud storage in the future given the premium they're charging. Moving the data wasn't that hard.
- izacus 6y ago
  "Premium" being 2.5$ a month for 200GB of storage space?
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Well, in fairness, Microsoft's Office365 subscriptions conveniently include 1TB of OneDrive storage. So, if you already need the other Microsoft Office apps, and are already going to pay for them, you essentially get 1TB of cloud storage "for free".
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Bundling a spreadsheet app with photo storage ought to be against some competition rule... Just like Amazon has taken over so many markets with Prime...
      - gruez 6y ago
        Disagree. As Steve job puts it: dropbox (and cloud storage in general) is "a feature and not a product".
        Alupis 6y ago
        While I agree it shouldn't be against some law or anything - we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't assume this was a calculated move to edge people into Office365 vs. GSuite/LibreOffice + DropBox, etc... 1TB is huge, and nobody can compete with that "for free" right now. Although, as a heavy OneDrive user, I'll tell you it's not nearly as good of a product as DropBox or even Google Drive (in my limited experience with both). The name of the OneDrive folder cannot be changed, it limits how large of a file you can sync into it, routinely gets "stuck" syncing forever (requiring a hard reset of OneDrive), has rate limited downloads, etc. It's clearly an afterthought for Microsoft - probably because they give it away for free.
mnutt 6y ago
I was surprised that Google's iOS app ignores iOS Photos' albums and favorites, and is practically the only app on my phone that doesn't allow me to share a picture into it from the camera/photos app. I went ahead and wrote my own app that provides the share extension and hooks up to the Google Photos API, but even with that I can't write photos to albums that weren't created by my app. It seems like Google _really_ doesn't want me to get photos into Google Photos for some reason?
- dangwu 6y ago
  The Google Photos iOS app just uploads all photos that my iPhone takes automatically, regardless of album. Yours doesn't?
  - sdljfjafsd 6y ago
    The issue is you have an existing photo in your iCloud that is not in your camera roll (which is something iOS can automatically do so many people have this use case) there was no easy way to transfer those photos to Google.
  - mnutt 6y ago
    My iPhoto photo set is much, much larger than Google Photos storage cap; I just want to share a couple of photos with family. But yeah, that sort of explains it. They're pushing you to just store everything in Google Photos.
  - treesknees 6y ago
    This is something I miss from Android. I could tell Google Photos to ignore my downloads and screenshots albums, but iOS you either need to manually select photos to upload, or upload all photos.
- janaagaard 6y ago
  > I was surprised that Google's iOS app ignores iOS Photos' albums and favorites. They recently made it possible to synchronize favorites between Google Photos and Apple Photos. Beware that turning this on resets the favorites you had made in Google Photos, keeping just the ones you have in Apple Photos, but once it has been turned on the synchronization seems to go both ways between the apps.
jrullman 6y ago
Part of the Data Transfer Project? https://datatransferproject.dev/ https://datatransferproject.dev/
- s1k3s 6y ago
  Also, wasn't this mandatory in EU? Something related to GDPR?
  - hkh28 6y ago
    Yes, data portability is a requirement in the GDPR. You should not be locked in to a service just because they have your data.
    - sircastor 6y ago
      Portability, yes, but does it require portability to another specific service? I understand being able to get your data out of a platform, but I don’t see a requirement that a given entity provide explicit transfer to another.
smoldesu 6y ago
For those of you wanting a way to get your photos out of Google, I recommend https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com I used it last week to migrate my Google photos to Nextcloud, it was pretty painless.
- ShamelessC 6y ago
  Word of caution - if you use Google Drive it will happily quickly dump as much as 200 GiB in your drive. if you don't have enough space, you get an incomplete download and five other Google services complaining you've run out of space.
  - sodality2 6y ago
    Mine is 350+. I dumped it on a HDD and forgot about it, came back the next day and it wasn't done. For some reason I was being throttled, I restarted the download and it was fast again. They sure do have a lot of data on me :(
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tcit 6y ago
  Nextcloud now has an app to migrate your Google data (files, photos, calendars and contacts) straight away.
- philposting 6y ago
  I used https://www.raidrive.com/ https://www.raidrive.com/ which lets you mount Google Photos as a (read-only) drive in Windows.
jedberg 6y ago
Is this to avoid some sort of monopoly accusation or the result of new data protection rules?
- dangwu 6y ago
  It's part of https://datatransferproject.dev/ https://datatransferproject.dev/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dartharva 6y ago
Unrelated, but this reminds me of a recent incident. A friend came over to me asking for help transferring his WhatsApp chats from his old iPhone to his new Android phone. Turns out there is no official/practical way to do that, and he lost all hos chat and media records made across years (WhatsApp is the main mode of communication here, it's like opening up your official mail inbox one day and finding it completely empty). He said he had lost them earlier as well, when he had migrated to an iPhone from an Android.
- XCSme 6y ago
  I also lost all my WhatsApp history and data when I added WhatsApp to a new phone. Weird that it can only be active on one device.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    The issue is how the data is backed up on Android vs iOS. In theory, if your iCloud or Google account is the same between devices then transfer to a new, same-OS device is trivial. It should "just work" in most cases. But WhatsApp does not provide its own backup service (which is fine with me) nor does it allow you to specify where to back it up to (which is not fine with me). If it did, then users switching between iOS and Android would have no (or little) trouble.
- drops 6y ago
  That's actually kind of insane. Seamless transfer would take quite a high priority on the scale of things to implement, one would (and will) imagine. Transferring from and iPhone to an iPhone is so well-done that it actually adds to the pleasure of having a new phone. This sounds like something a fanboy would say, but honestly it's just a really rather objective comparison of the functionality.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  It's because Whatsapp backs up to Google Drive and iCloud respectively. I have no idea why the backup format can't be agnostic of what it's backed up on. That would make the syncing logic agnostic as well.
minikites 6y ago
Why would I transfer my photos into Google Photos, a service that Google will probably shut down in a year, once it has outlived its purpose of training their machine learning models? The only reason Gmail is still around is because of how valuable that data is for advertisers. Google can't run ads on your family photos so as soon as they have enough photos for their machine learning algorithms, they'll shut down the service. I can't imagine the thought process of someone who thinks it would be a good idea to migrate all of your personal photos to a service run by an advertising company.
soheil 6y ago
This is great I wish they’d give an option to just download all your photos as a zip file.
Rygian 6y ago
Seems to be a move in the right direction to be compliant with GDPR. Article 20 [1] gives me the right to have my personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another controller (where technically feasible). We should be seeing this kind of feature available in all services targeted at European citizens. [1] https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-20/ https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-20/
qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
How about just letting me be able to plug my phone into any laptop and drag and drop my pictures?
- djrogers 6y ago
  You mean like has been possible since the first iPhone? Or am I missing something here - I plug in my iPhone and open the same Image Capture utility that I'd use with any other camera (or SD Card) and import my photos.
  - qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
    Import is different than drag and drop. The image folder doesn’t show on windows, linux, or even my Mac.
JAKWAI 6y ago
Increasing the UX of a product never seems to be a mistake. And of course switching to another device is also part of the User Experience.
codys 6y ago
While it's good that this is finally being provided, it's still somewhat amazing that there isn't any documented API to interact with iCloud. One can of course, on Apple hardware, use apple proprietary APIs to do some things. Or one can use the iCloudJs stuff from a webpage. But there's not an official/documented way to, say, write a program that runs on a Linux server to mirror photos in iCloud to disk (or access any other iCloud data). There are reverse engineered APIs that folks can use to interact with it, but the official iCloud story has been data lock in.
- grishka 6y ago
  If they did have official APIs, that would mean that someone would eventually make use of them to make an Android client. And that would be absolutely unacceptable. /s
  - nvrspyx 6y ago
    Are you sure you meant to include that "/s"?
- jpdaigle 6y ago
  Oh yes. I'd love to be able to hook up Google Assistant devices to my iCloud reminders lists, so that "remind me tomorrow to call the doctor" spoken to the Google Home would just nicely become an iOS reminder.
  - m0dest 6y ago
    You can set this up with IFTTT.
modeitsch 6y ago
It’s good that apple offers this but when you try to move your photos away from google photos It’s hard like hell
- ransom_rs 6y ago
  Isn't Google Takeout pretty easy?
  - jjcon 6y ago
    Google takeout rips out a lot of metadata information and virtually all organization you had - there are a couple open source projects trying to replace or augment gphotos takeout so it is useable but as is it isn’t a viable option for large libraries
dangwu 6y ago
If any Google Photos product people are here... Since you're ending free unlimited photo storage, I badly want a feature that automatically finds all groupings of similar photos and deletes all but the best one (least blurry, most smiles, whatever you decide). Whenever I take photos, I tend to spam the shutter button, so I end up with 3+ photos of anything and everything. I could stay on Google Photos for many, many more years if I had this auto clean up capability.
- elliottkember 6y ago
  I don't know whether you're on iOS, but if you are, the app on the app store called "Gemini" has been a game-changer for me in this regard.
  - amazon_throw 6y ago
    Is this the one? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/id1277110040 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/... (There are a lot of "Gemini" bitcoin apps, apparently...)
  - adrr 6y ago
    Gemini is a great app. I wish apple photos or google photos had similar features. Even Lightroom needs it since 1/5 of my photos are out of focus.
    - ghostpepper 6y ago
      I like the idea but I’m a bit put off by the new privacy tags on the App Store: this app uses product interaction, device ID and user ID track me? No thanks Off topic but I also hate the new trend of apps not telling you how much the full version costs until after you’ve installed it.
- Solocomplex 6y ago
  Pixel motion photos Top Shot uses AI to do this.
- 6y ago
jcims 6y ago
Lol two months ago I moved about 80GB of photos from iCloud to Google and it was an absolute nightmare. Nothing worked correctly through the entire collection.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  Imagine a service which properly integrated your phone camera (such that messaging etc worked nicely) had a desktop app and allowed network storage and backup. Have I just missed this application?
  - jcims 6y ago
    Oh there’s an application alright. Getting it to actually do its job is another matter entirely.
  - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
    I use iPhone + Apple’s Photos app on MacOS for this, but I also include Dropbox for backing up directly from the phone and from any SD cards from other cameras. I also make a backup copy of Dropbox myself.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      Is this all automatic (excluding the SD card bit)?
      - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
        Yes - my phone adds all the photos I take to Apple's Photos and to Dropbox (and Google Photos). I treat Dropbox as the source of truth - and Photos + Google Photos as just useful copies (Photos so I can browse my photos nicely and Google Photos so I can search then nicely). I have Dropbox installed on a machine with a large enough drive to sync it all locally. I leave Backblaze backup running on there to keep a proper backup of Dropbox to their cloud. I also make physical backups of this Dropbox sync every so often to cheap spinning disks - and store them away safely. The only things that aren't automatic here are the physical copies every year or so, and occasionally opening Dropbox on my phone to check it seems to be happily syncing.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload? There aren't any other real competitors AFAIK, but still why not just make it a simple export rather than an integration that will require continual maintenance?
- lxgr 6y ago
  Having both would be nice, but given the amounts of data available and the asymmetric nature of many residential internet connections, I think doing the upload themselves would be prohibitive for many users.
- _jal 6y ago
  My guess is this is designed for the lowest-common-denominator. Sucking down a multi-hundred-gig tarball on a phone to turn around and re-upload sounds like a poor user experience to me, and Apple has opinions about those.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  For me that would be a 600+ gig download. I wish I could do it, but it’s a little unwieldy.
- jmfisch 6y ago
  Convenience, speed, and technical difficulty (for the typical person, not HN reader). Definitely, I've faced this problem. My photo and video library on Google Photos is now much larger than the free space I have on any device. The hassle of downloading in chunks, just to re-upload (and heaven help anyone on an ISP with data caps) is huge. It's also probably very slow - consider the bandwidth between an Apple and a Google server - most likely in the 10Gbps range? Compare that with an average person doing 50Mbps down and then 8Mbps up. For a 500GB library that takes _hours_.
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  > Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload? I'm of the (perhaps cynical) view that Apple is only doing this to satisfy their legal obligations under the GDPR, and GDPR requires direct transfer.
y04nn 6y ago
Please add a way to export Notes also. I've not tried hard to export them because I still can access them, but I would like a way to export them to an archive.
- PascLeRasc 6y ago
  Ulysses has an AppleScript export to Markdown files, that might work for you.
Maxburn 6y ago
More ways to do this is nice but you could always download and upload. This isn't some amazing new thing that was keeping you from doing that.
graham1776 6y ago
I have the reverse problem...I need to liberate my 600GB of photos from Dropbox into iCloud. Any reccomendations without downloading the entire thing to an external drive and re-uploading?
m463 6y ago
If they're a privacy company, they should just offer a dedicated home server for this sort of thing. personal icloud, with all the apple trimmings. It is ok to sell this to you and charge money.
baby 6y ago
I really really hate how locked I am on the products I own... I pay for Apple music yet I can't play it on my Google home. I use Google maps yet in some apps it forces me to use Apple maps (even though I don't have it installed). I use Google photos, which I can't use to manage my photos in the native way that Apple photos do it. Airdrop only works between Apple devices. I use Chrome and yet some apps will just open links in Safari (iOS).
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  At least being able to move your photos out of Apple Photos is a step towards not locking you into Apple's ecosystem. I don't think the ultimate goal is removing lock in completely. It's a fools errand to try and defeat it. The goal should be to free you from being locked into a company that takes it too far. This creates free choice and a market opportunity for another business to serve people like you. Also .. I thought Apple Music was added to Google Home? I thought Apple now allows you to choose Google Maps as default mapping app?
  - sigjuice 6y ago
    So far, Apple only allows changing the default web browser or email app.
rakoo 6y ago
It is a bit sad to see something as simple as "you can now take your photos and put them where you want" become a newsworthy article. This is yet another demonstration that Digital Feudalism is alive and well, and just like its ancestor, we need to get rid of it by empowering people to be their own self
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Barrin92 6y ago
  force protocols to be open would just about do it. People would trivially write cross-service applications on top and we could have an internet where people can freely move data around. Apple and Google would be delegated to the backend and users could choose the clients they want. It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. We're stuck in the 19th century railroad industry.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    > It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. At what point do you become compelled to start transforming your web application into an open protocol?
    - pydry 6y ago
      Maybe at the unicorn mark.
    - barnabee 6y ago
      Certainly any company that relies on “safe harbor” style protections or sells online services (alone or bundled with software) as a subscription should be required to fully open and document the protocol.
      - AmericanChopper 6y ago
        But most SaaS companies don’t make protocols, they make web applications. So I’m not really sure what’s implied by these trivial-to-implement protocols. Having a functional and well documented API isn’t a protocol. An open protocol would be more like a situation where any vendor could implement an “iCloud service”, and any “iCloud client” could connect to any vendors service.
fungiblecog 6y ago
Just give us a ‘download all’ button with the ability to resume in the event of a failure. RSync has been around for a long time why reinvent the wheel for every different service. Welcome to Modern tech - constantly reinventing (square) wheel
- fartcannon 6y ago
  But if I don't pretend your photos live in an ephemeral 'cloud', instead of where they really are - on my server, how can I trick you into letting me hide them behind a worse-than-even-just-using-FTP webpage. Walled Gardens Must Die.
- luplex 6y ago
  GDPR gives you this button. You can do a full data request. This was introduced for exactly this usecase, to make it possible to switch service providers. Now only Google needs to be able to read Apple's format.
  - safog 6y ago
    Pretty sure even if Google doesn't support it explicitly, you'll have open source tools that can download + re-upload to Google.
    - lupire 6y ago
      That assumes Google provides API and authorizes the access, or else you're stuck scraping complex web apps with a Chrome extension. Custom 3rd party software is usually banned from a consumer cloud API for security reasons.
      - safog 6y ago
        I'd say it's pretty common with cloud providers actually. Bring in data? (Spotify playlists, Photos, Contacts etc. etc.) come on in, we have great APIs. Want to take your data out? File a GDPR request and get it in some opaque format. No incentive for Google to explicitly refuse photos from Apple for example.
pentae 6y ago
Would love to see this come to Apple Notes, it'd be great to be able to export just for backup purposes
- philposting 6y ago
  There’s this nice app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12
moron4hire 6y ago
Aaaw, thanks Apple. You're a mensch. -_-
abhayhegde 6y ago
Mind you, Google's free plan gives only 15GB space. Purchasing larger space requires unnecessary monthly expense. Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution.
- comeonseriously 6y ago
  Yes, because iCloud and Google Photos shouldn't be considered the only piece to a backup solution.
- treesknees 6y ago
  Google's storage plans start at $19.99/year for 100GB. For less than a cup of coffee every month I'm able to back up my photos wherever I am, search across photos, share them easily with iOS and Android users, easily buy larger prints and photo books. Yes, there's the fact that Google scans photos. I personally find it really useful to search for an object or face in Google Photos that other services just don't do as well. >Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution Well of course that's true. Nothing will beat owning a physical copy of your files in terms of backups/reliability in the worst cases. But you can always do both. Upload to the cloud and perform periodic account takeouts of your photos and store them to disk.
comeonseriously 6y ago
I want them to support smb. I would like to be able to sync my photos to a network share. This doesn't mean I wouldn't still buy iCloud space.
vishnumohandas 6y ago
If Apple opened up their APIs so that data could be imported by ANY authorized third party service, that would be fantastic. This post is about a behind-closed-doors deal with Google. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see a reason to celebrate.
- varispeed 6y ago
  They have to do it by law (GDPR) if they want to sell their products in the EU. People should start making complaints that they cannot port their data to other services, then they should implement that in no time.
  - vishnumohandas 6y ago
    > People should start making complaints Do you know how to go about this? Thanks!
varispeed 6y ago
They don't do any favour. They are supposed to allow it by law because of GDPR. If GDPR was not passed, I personally doubt Apple would do anything. They should allow export not only to Google Photos but also for yourself to download in a way that you could import it to any other photo storage service.
- chrisshroba 6y ago
  How are they obligated by GDPR to support server side data transfer to Google in particular? My understanding is that they are only required to make it possible for you to download your data so that you can upload it elsewhere if you'd like to.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/right-to-data-portability/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... The right to data portability allows individuals to obtain and reuse their personal data for their own purposes across different services. It allows them to move, copy or transfer personal data easily from one IT environment to another in a safe and secure way, without affecting its usability. It doesn't say that they have to implement moving from one provider to another without you having to download the data, but I think the key phrase is "easily from one IT environment to another in a safe and secure way, without affecting its usability".
rsync 6y ago
Does rclone[1] interface with iCloud Photos ? It works just fine with google photos[2] ... Without installing rclone and without using any of your own bandwidth, you should be able to: ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah gphotos:/blah Or maybe you just want to keep a copy in your rsync.net account: ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah /your/dir/tree [1] https://rclone.org https://rclone.org [2] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/ https://rclone.org/googlephotos/
- jdxcode 6y ago
  iCloud photos aren’t just jpegs in a directory
  - rsync 6y ago
    Take a look at the rclone targets list: https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/ In fact, most of them are not files in a directory - that's what makes most of the rclone use-cases so impressive. If they can interact with gdrive/photos/S3/etc. they should be able to interact with iCloud Photos ...
- atdt 6y ago
  Frustratingly, support for Google Photos in rclone is handicapped by the limitations of the Google Photos API: you can't download Photos at original resolution. This is documented on your second link.
  - rsync 6y ago
    That's unfortunate ... and I believe there are some other end-user ("consumer") products that also interfere with the direct mechanism that 'rclone' uses to request data.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  > It works just fine with google photos Second line in your link: > NB The Google Photos API which rclone uses has quite a few limitations, so please read the limitations[0] section carefully to make sure it is suitable for your use. For anyone intending to use rclone to download their photos from Google Photos, be aware that you will lose EXIF data. If you download videos, they will be lower quality. There are more limitations in the link. [0] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations
iso1631 6y ago
So I could transfer from icloud to google then import into digikam. Interesting Why can't I just download a zip from icloud with my 13,000 photos/videos inside? Where's the API?
GNU_James 6y ago
>Lets You Ye, no. I still spit on them.
sullysaas 6y ago
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..
- steren 6y ago
  I have 400GB in Google Photos, and I am able to use Google Takeout to download them as multiple archives. I try to back them every 1/2 years on a hard drive. Since I assume you are a Google One user. Maybe contact support and share your issue?
- trimbo 6y ago
  Does it actually miss data that should be there or does the Takeout fail?
- elcomet 6y ago
  Did you try rclone ?
  - anaganisk 6y ago
    Rclone can't download original quality files from google photos(API limitation)
    - elcomet 6y ago
      Thanks, I had no idea.
hankchinaski 6y ago
i wanted to do the exact opposite, moving photos from Google to apple icloud but google takeout exports are a complete mess
jw14 6y ago
When is google going to offer to transfer my photos to iCloud? I've done it using their export.. it was a nightmare. Dates aren't preserved.
Clampower 6y ago
Does anybody have a way do something like this from Google photos to a different host? I really want a second copy of stuff on Google photos, and takeout is completely unusable for me.
cryptoquick 6y ago
What, so Google can just go ahead and delete them?
- seaman1921 6y ago
  please reserve such comments to reddit
kccqzy 6y ago
> Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo. This is actually a dealbreaker. When I edit a photo, I expect the service to store both the original and the edited version, so that I can revert the edit or just look at the original version straight from the camera at any time. I have actually went back and looked at old edited photos I took, and found the edits to be way too heavy handed (too much contrast, too much saturation, etc) than I'd prefer today. One's taste as a photographer grows and changes.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
Still missing Google Photos as offloading service. Which seems blatantly illegal. p.s. I'd love to use iCloud if it wasn't so slow and buggy (watching old videos on Mac is basically a chore).
Pokepokalypse 6y ago
That's the last fucking place I want my photos. When you run out of space, you're screwed.
subpixel 6y ago
Funny reading this while Apple re-uploads my entire 10+ year photo library _from an external drive_ back to iCloud after I fresh-installed Big Sur.
- ftio 6y ago
  Protip: go the other direction. I've found that re-downloading the whole thing into a new library is >10x faster than resyncing your local 'originals' with iCloud. I have no idea why this is, but I've done the 'download' method twice, and it has been so much faster and more reliable (and less stressful).
Black101 6y ago
next thing, they will let you hold the copyright for your own pictures...
sdfjkl 6y ago
My photos are on my drive in a bunch of messy folders and I can transfer them wherever I want. Get your filthy clouds off my lawn.
- owaislone 6y ago
  I so want to go back to this but after losing two of my 2 TB drives got corrupted in the past 15 years and now I'm scared of leaving everything on a drive. Perhaps a cheap S3 deep archive storage + a physical drive as main storage is the answer but then I won't have an app like Google Photos which is actually pretty great especially for sharing with family.
owaislone 6y ago
Unrelated but does anyone know if the partner sharing photos in Google Photos costs double the storage? I know I can view my partners photos in the app but there is a "save" feature which allows me to save my partners photos to my own "galley". Does that mean the photo counts towards my Google One storage twice? I think it doesn't but I'm not sure.
- donatzsky 6y ago
  Pretty sure it only counts if you save them to your own library. Also, if you don't save them before turning off partner sharing, they'll disappear.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Truth is I don't want anything to be uploaded to Google, Apple or any other cloud. I want everything to go straight to my own server!
- smasher164 6y ago
  If iOS supported Time Machine backups, my NAS backup solution would be complete. It's crazy that we're either locked into iCloud or have to sync with iTunes. Yes, I know about iTunes Wifi backup, but I'd rather not be on my home network for this.
Ecko123 6y ago
Improving their ML models with more data.
punnerud 6y ago
This is probably the effect of GDPR Article 20: “(..) the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible.“ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
asimpletune 6y ago
Wow that’s awesome, now I wish they’d add Amazon Photos as well.
batmaniam 6y ago
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.
swiley 6y ago
How about letting us just download a targz of them? Why is this so hard?
jqquah 6y ago
Now we just need to be able to transfer iCloud backup of Whatsapp to Google Drive
WhyNotHugo 6y ago
Curious to see this evolve. Article seems to hint that it's just Google Photos "for now", but that may change in future. I'd love to have it as a backup mechanism to dump all my photos onto an external hard drive. Doing it now is pretty non-trivial unless you have a mac.

558 points by brunoluiz 6y ago

This article is a little weird. The title is actually "Transfer a copy of your iCloud Photos collection to another service" but then the small print says "...to Google Photos." It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet? It also only allows customers from a small fraction of countries to use this, which I really don't get. Maybe those are all the places iCloud Photos and Google Photos are currently available together? But I don't get that either.

reaperducer 6y ago
It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet? Considering the fourth word of the second paragraph is "initially," I think you're correct — this is a work in progress. 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, and it took me almost a week to make a local backup of my wife's iCloud photos.
- miles 6y ago
  > 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").
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    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"). Unfortunately, that wouldn't work for my wife's situation. Her computer is one of those MacBooks with a 256GB drive, and only one USB-C port. So the amount of data stored in her iCloud photos would easily overload her drive, and if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed. I'm not interested in buying a hub for a one-off operation. I tried afp:// and smb:// mounting Photos libraries on large drives on other machines on the LAN, then downloading the photos to those, but that turned out to be excruciatingly slow, and very unreliable.
    - capableweb 6y ago
      This is not directly aimed at you but rather the hilarity of the situation. > only one USB-C port [...] if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed. Absolutely crazy how we ended up accepting supposedly professional devices that work like this. Choose between having power or being able to use a external hard drive (unless you purchase accessories of course). Mean while, desktop computers are built to be customizable in every single way.
      - ktapcnbje 6y ago
        I agree that it was outrageous that the MacBook (2015-2019) only had one USB port. However, Apple never called it Pro. The MacBook Pro has at least 2 USB ports.
        capableweb 6y ago
        > However, Apple never called it Pro. I think in the marketing material, Apple tends to call everything they do "for professionals", not just the line of hardware with "Pro" in its name.
        reaperducer 6y ago
        No, this was just a plain consumer-level MacBook, sold alongside both the Pro and the Air line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2015–2019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2015–2019)
      - lupire 6y ago
        A laptop can be customized with accessories, same as a desktop can.
    - crooked-v 6y ago
      Library view, All Photos, then click and shift-click to select a range of photos, File -> Export Unmodified Original. That way you can export a chunk at a time, as long as you keep track of which ones you stopped at for each batch.
  - intrasight 6y ago
    I wonder if you can do this using an AWS instance of a mac. And then move the photos to S3.
    - alsetmusic 6y ago
      > 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.
- sigjuice 6y ago
  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.
  - intrasight 6y ago
    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.
    - alsetmusic 6y ago
      > 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 https://www.arqbackup.com
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    I run this docker container on my Synology to have it download a backup of my iCloud Photo Library https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/icloudpd/icloudpd/ https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/icloudpd/icloudpd/ https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
- enra 6y ago
  You can do this with the Windows iCloud app. Just downloaded 7000 photos through it.
londons_explore 6y ago
It'll be countries where Apple is facing anti-trust complaints.
jonas21 6y ago
Yeah, just a small fraction of countries, like the United States and the European Union. I'm sure nobody cares about those places.
- jakemal 6y ago
  Yes, only a billion people in the wealthiest countries in the world who are most likely to own an Apple device.
  - BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
    You don't think that more people use Apple iCloud in Japan or India (total population 1.5 billion) than in Liechtenstein (total population approximately 0)?
    - umeshunni 6y ago
      Liechtenstein is a part of the EU and is subject to the same regulations as the rest of the EU. Launching a product in Japan or India require an entirely new set of legal and regulatory work.
      - BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
        > Liechtenstein is a part of the EU No it isn't, which is why Apple specifically calls it out when they also have an entry for "the European Union". Economic Area, yes, Union, no. And Switzerland is part of neither and has their own data regulation separate from the GDPR.
        robotresearcher 6y ago
        There is a single trade framework that contains them all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market
- BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
wlesieutre 6y ago
The actual transfer page also says "Choose where you’d like to transfer your photos:" and has a dropdown titled "Select destination" There's nothing but Google Photos to choose from now, but the intent is definitely to support other services.
dangwu 6y ago
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.
- krrrh 6y ago
  That's interesting, and it's the first I've heard of the project. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Apple has yet released the adaptors to the open source project [1]. As much as I'm not interested in having Apple copy my photos to Google, I am very interested in scripting my own offline backups without having to make space for Photos.app to store all my photos on my laptop's SSD. Hopefully the adaptors are added to the project soon. [1] https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/extensions/data-transfer https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/...
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Once your library gets large, local storage is just too hard and expensive on a laptop. Photos.app seems to hate using external or network drives.
    - spullara 6y ago
      I've been using it on an external drive for ages. What kinds of issues have you run into?
    - beamatronic 6y ago
      I would really like to know if the M1 chip helps this in any regard.
    - PhilosAccnting 6y ago
      Yes, but self-made NAS is always an option, and in this case I'd almost say an ideal for when the balance of trust leans away from unnamed organizations holding your information.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago

msh 6y ago

Then we are only missing google providing the same service! (I know of google takeout, which is great but not the same as this)

1f60c 6y ago
Yup. For those of us with slow WiFi, Google Takeout is basically unusable.
- slaymaker1907 6y ago
  If you really want to get those files, you could try using a VM on a fast network (not sure which cloud offering would be best for this in terms of bandwidth cost). This is not ideal at all, just suggesting a trick I've used in the past as a workaround for big downloads on an unreliable network. Obviously Google should just improve their service.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  FWIW, you can do a takeout to another service like OneDrive or another Google Drive account and use their clients to sync. You can probably use wget to download in a more stable way, too.
- kuyan 6y ago
  I've had the same experience. The worst part is that you can only retry a download of a Google Takeout archive so many times before it locks you out, and you have to wait a day or so for a new takeout...
VladimirGolovin 6y ago
Takeout is NOT great, at least in my case. I never once managed to fully download my photo archive, despite my repeated attempts. I gave up, so my current "strategy" for keeping my photos safe is "Never ever do anything that might make Google algorithms think that I'm violating their ToS".
- jkingsman 6y ago

cube2222 6y ago

Is there similar functionality for the other way around? So basically a simple migration from Google Photos to iCloud?

smoldesu 6y ago
This should be what you're looking for: https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Takeout is table stakes for Google’s position in the market. They really need to better support 3rd parties making a Takeout request on behalf of a user, and those services then retrieving the Takeout bundle for ingestion.
  - slaymaker1907 6y ago
    But what about the privacy, the PRIVACY! /s I'm 100% sure that's the excuse they will give, but I don't think this is a huge problem as long as there is a big scary box about what allowing an app to use Takeout means (a scarier box than just normal permissions, probably lots of red and exclamation points).
- nlgfd 6y ago
  nah it's not the same - I migrated from Google Photos to OneDrive last month and while it did migrate everything to OneDrive for me, it put everything into little 10GB .zips that I had to download, extract, re-upload.
asadlionpk 6y ago
I would love that as I have to move my family from Google to iCloud.

ncann 6y ago

A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon, but it's still miles better than iCloud Photos in almost everything. From search, to timeline overview, to seamless integration with my Chromecast, to automatic face tagging, to editing.

janlaureys 6y ago
Anecdotal annoyance with automatic face tagging: Old dog and new dog look very similar. Google keeps tagging my new dog as if he were my old dog and I haven't found a way to fix that without manually going through every single picture and untagging/retagging.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  I'm just amazed these services have face tagging for dogs, and that you consider it so obvious that you feel like complaining about it.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    If it's broken, then it's broken. It doesn't matter how futuristic and awesome it is.
    - ghostpepper 6y ago
      Yep, in this case it sounds like “awesome futuristic idea poorly implemented” is worse than not having the feature. Adding a simple toggle to disable it (or even better, a blacklist of tags to never auto-add) would be the best compromise.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    I uploaded a 4D obstetric ultrasound to get rid of the CD. Photos.app tagged it as my child. That blew my mind.
- mav3rick 6y ago
  You can manually go and say "this is my new dog" to improve the tagging.

airhead969 6y ago

Doesn't the Google Photo app do this already without waiting? Is there a use-case for this?

navanchauhan 6y ago
If I understand correctly, this directly transfers data from Apple’s server to theirs. You don’t need to even install their app.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Seems like a one-time export, unless I'm wrong. CloudHQ used to synchronize content between clouds but they seem to have fewer features these days.

LegitShady 6y ago

I migrated away from Google Cloud storage this year given their announcement. The Microsoft office 365 family deal made at more sense. I can't see myself using Google cloud storage in the future given the premium they're charging. Moving the data wasn't that hard.

izacus 6y ago
"Premium" being 2.5$ a month for 200GB of storage space?
- Alupis 6y ago
  Well, in fairness, Microsoft's Office365 subscriptions conveniently include 1TB of OneDrive storage. So, if you already need the other Microsoft Office apps, and are already going to pay for them, you essentially get 1TB of cloud storage "for free".
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Bundling a spreadsheet app with photo storage ought to be against some competition rule... Just like Amazon has taken over so many markets with Prime...
    - gruez 6y ago
      Disagree. As Steve job puts it: dropbox (and cloud storage in general) is "a feature and not a product".
      - Alupis 6y ago
        While I agree it shouldn't be against some law or anything - we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't assume this was a calculated move to edge people into Office365 vs. GSuite/LibreOffice + DropBox, etc... 1TB is huge, and nobody can compete with that "for free" right now. Although, as a heavy OneDrive user, I'll tell you it's not nearly as good of a product as DropBox or even Google Drive (in my limited experience with both). The name of the OneDrive folder cannot be changed, it limits how large of a file you can sync into it, routinely gets "stuck" syncing forever (requiring a hard reset of OneDrive), has rate limited downloads, etc. It's clearly an afterthought for Microsoft - probably because they give it away for free.

mnutt 6y ago

I was surprised that Google's iOS app ignores iOS Photos' albums and favorites, and is practically the only app on my phone that doesn't allow me to share a picture into it from the camera/photos app. I went ahead and wrote my own app that provides the share extension and hooks up to the Google Photos API, but even with that I can't write photos to albums that weren't created by my app. It seems like Google _really_ doesn't want me to get photos into Google Photos for some reason?

dangwu 6y ago
The Google Photos iOS app just uploads all photos that my iPhone takes automatically, regardless of album. Yours doesn't?
- sdljfjafsd 6y ago
  The issue is you have an existing photo in your iCloud that is not in your camera roll (which is something iOS can automatically do so many people have this use case) there was no easy way to transfer those photos to Google.
- mnutt 6y ago
  My iPhoto photo set is much, much larger than Google Photos storage cap; I just want to share a couple of photos with family. But yeah, that sort of explains it. They're pushing you to just store everything in Google Photos.
- treesknees 6y ago
  This is something I miss from Android. I could tell Google Photos to ignore my downloads and screenshots albums, but iOS you either need to manually select photos to upload, or upload all photos.
janaagaard 6y ago
> I was surprised that Google's iOS app ignores iOS Photos' albums and favorites. They recently made it possible to synchronize favorites between Google Photos and Apple Photos. Beware that turning this on resets the favorites you had made in Google Photos, keeping just the ones you have in Apple Photos, but once it has been turned on the synchronization seems to go both ways between the apps.

jrullman 6y ago

Part of the Data Transfer Project? https://datatransferproject.dev/ https://datatransferproject.dev/

s1k3s 6y ago
Also, wasn't this mandatory in EU? Something related to GDPR?
- hkh28 6y ago
  Yes, data portability is a requirement in the GDPR. You should not be locked in to a service just because they have your data.
  - sircastor 6y ago
    Portability, yes, but does it require portability to another specific service? I understand being able to get your data out of a platform, but I don’t see a requirement that a given entity provide explicit transfer to another.

smoldesu 6y ago

For those of you wanting a way to get your photos out of Google, I recommend https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com I used it last week to migrate my Google photos to Nextcloud, it was pretty painless.

ShamelessC 6y ago
Word of caution - if you use Google Drive it will happily quickly dump as much as 200 GiB in your drive. if you don't have enough space, you get an incomplete download and five other Google services complaining you've run out of space.
- sodality2 6y ago
  Mine is 350+. I dumped it on a HDD and forgot about it, came back the next day and it wasn't done. For some reason I was being throttled, I restarted the download and it was fast again. They sure do have a lot of data on me :(
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tcit 6y ago
Nextcloud now has an app to migrate your Google data (files, photos, calendars and contacts) straight away.
philposting 6y ago
I used https://www.raidrive.com/ https://www.raidrive.com/ which lets you mount Google Photos as a (read-only) drive in Windows.

jedberg 6y ago

Is this to avoid some sort of monopoly accusation or the result of new data protection rules?

dangwu 6y ago
It's part of https://datatransferproject.dev/ https://datatransferproject.dev/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dartharva 6y ago

Unrelated, but this reminds me of a recent incident. A friend came over to me asking for help transferring his WhatsApp chats from his old iPhone to his new Android phone. Turns out there is no official/practical way to do that, and he lost all hos chat and media records made across years (WhatsApp is the main mode of communication here, it's like opening up your official mail inbox one day and finding it completely empty). He said he had lost them earlier as well, when he had migrated to an iPhone from an Android.

XCSme 6y ago
I also lost all my WhatsApp history and data when I added WhatsApp to a new phone. Weird that it can only be active on one device.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  The issue is how the data is backed up on Android vs iOS. In theory, if your iCloud or Google account is the same between devices then transfer to a new, same-OS device is trivial. It should "just work" in most cases. But WhatsApp does not provide its own backup service (which is fine with me) nor does it allow you to specify where to back it up to (which is not fine with me). If it did, then users switching between iOS and Android would have no (or little) trouble.
drops 6y ago
That's actually kind of insane. Seamless transfer would take quite a high priority on the scale of things to implement, one would (and will) imagine. Transferring from and iPhone to an iPhone is so well-done that it actually adds to the pleasure of having a new phone. This sounds like something a fanboy would say, but honestly it's just a really rather objective comparison of the functionality.
mav3rick 6y ago
It's because Whatsapp backs up to Google Drive and iCloud respectively. I have no idea why the backup format can't be agnostic of what it's backed up on. That would make the syncing logic agnostic as well.

minikites 6y ago

Why would I transfer my photos into Google Photos, a service that Google will probably shut down in a year, once it has outlived its purpose of training their machine learning models? The only reason Gmail is still around is because of how valuable that data is for advertisers. Google can't run ads on your family photos so as soon as they have enough photos for their machine learning algorithms, they'll shut down the service. I can't imagine the thought process of someone who thinks it would be a good idea to migrate all of your personal photos to a service run by an advertising company.

soheil 6y ago

This is great I wish they’d give an option to just download all your photos as a zip file.

Rygian 6y ago

Seems to be a move in the right direction to be compliant with GDPR. Article 20 [1] gives me the right to have my personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another controller (where technically feasible). We should be seeing this kind of feature available in all services targeted at European citizens. [1] https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-20/ https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-20/

qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago

How about just letting me be able to plug my phone into any laptop and drag and drop my pictures?

djrogers 6y ago
You mean like has been possible since the first iPhone? Or am I missing something here - I plug in my iPhone and open the same Image Capture utility that I'd use with any other camera (or SD Card) and import my photos.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
  Import is different than drag and drop. The image folder doesn’t show on windows, linux, or even my Mac.

JAKWAI 6y ago

Increasing the UX of a product never seems to be a mistake. And of course switching to another device is also part of the User Experience.

codys 6y ago

While it's good that this is finally being provided, it's still somewhat amazing that there isn't any documented API to interact with iCloud. One can of course, on Apple hardware, use apple proprietary APIs to do some things. Or one can use the iCloudJs stuff from a webpage. But there's not an official/documented way to, say, write a program that runs on a Linux server to mirror photos in iCloud to disk (or access any other iCloud data). There are reverse engineered APIs that folks can use to interact with it, but the official iCloud story has been data lock in.

grishka 6y ago
If they did have official APIs, that would mean that someone would eventually make use of them to make an Android client. And that would be absolutely unacceptable. /s
- nvrspyx 6y ago
  Are you sure you meant to include that "/s"?
jpdaigle 6y ago
Oh yes. I'd love to be able to hook up Google Assistant devices to my iCloud reminders lists, so that "remind me tomorrow to call the doctor" spoken to the Google Home would just nicely become an iOS reminder.
- m0dest 6y ago
  You can set this up with IFTTT.

modeitsch 6y ago

It’s good that apple offers this but when you try to move your photos away from google photos It’s hard like hell

ransom_rs 6y ago
Isn't Google Takeout pretty easy?
- jjcon 6y ago
  Google takeout rips out a lot of metadata information and virtually all organization you had - there are a couple open source projects trying to replace or augment gphotos takeout so it is useable but as is it isn’t a viable option for large libraries

dangwu 6y ago

If any Google Photos product people are here... Since you're ending free unlimited photo storage, I badly want a feature that automatically finds all groupings of similar photos and deletes all but the best one (least blurry, most smiles, whatever you decide). Whenever I take photos, I tend to spam the shutter button, so I end up with 3+ photos of anything and everything. I could stay on Google Photos for many, many more years if I had this auto clean up capability.

elliottkember 6y ago
I don't know whether you're on iOS, but if you are, the app on the app store called "Gemini" has been a game-changer for me in this regard.
- amazon_throw 6y ago
  Is this the one? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/id1277110040 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/... (There are a lot of "Gemini" bitcoin apps, apparently...)
- adrr 6y ago
  Gemini is a great app. I wish apple photos or google photos had similar features. Even Lightroom needs it since 1/5 of my photos are out of focus.
  - ghostpepper 6y ago
    I like the idea but I’m a bit put off by the new privacy tags on the App Store: this app uses product interaction, device ID and user ID track me? No thanks Off topic but I also hate the new trend of apps not telling you how much the full version costs until after you’ve installed it.
Solocomplex 6y ago
Pixel motion photos Top Shot uses AI to do this.
6y ago

jcims 6y ago

Lol two months ago I moved about 80GB of photos from iCloud to Google and it was an absolute nightmare. Nothing worked correctly through the entire collection.

lostlogin 6y ago
Imagine a service which properly integrated your phone camera (such that messaging etc worked nicely) had a desktop app and allowed network storage and backup. Have I just missed this application?
- jcims 6y ago
  Oh there’s an application alright. Getting it to actually do its job is another matter entirely.
- tokamak-teapot 6y ago
  I use iPhone + Apple’s Photos app on MacOS for this, but I also include Dropbox for backing up directly from the phone and from any SD cards from other cameras. I also make a backup copy of Dropbox myself.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Is this all automatic (excluding the SD card bit)?
    - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
      Yes - my phone adds all the photos I take to Apple's Photos and to Dropbox (and Google Photos). I treat Dropbox as the source of truth - and Photos + Google Photos as just useful copies (Photos so I can browse my photos nicely and Google Photos so I can search then nicely). I have Dropbox installed on a machine with a large enough drive to sync it all locally. I leave Backblaze backup running on there to keep a proper backup of Dropbox to their cloud. I also make physical backups of this Dropbox sync every so often to cheap spinning disks - and store them away safely. The only things that aren't automatic here are the physical copies every year or so, and occasionally opening Dropbox on my phone to check it seems to be happily syncing.

morpheuskafka 6y ago

Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload? There aren't any other real competitors AFAIK, but still why not just make it a simple export rather than an integration that will require continual maintenance?

lxgr 6y ago
Having both would be nice, but given the amounts of data available and the asymmetric nature of many residential internet connections, I think doing the upload themselves would be prohibitive for many users.
_jal 6y ago
My guess is this is designed for the lowest-common-denominator. Sucking down a multi-hundred-gig tarball on a phone to turn around and re-upload sounds like a poor user experience to me, and Apple has opinions about those.
lostlogin 6y ago
For me that would be a 600+ gig download. I wish I could do it, but it’s a little unwieldy.
jmfisch 6y ago
Convenience, speed, and technical difficulty (for the typical person, not HN reader). Definitely, I've faced this problem. My photo and video library on Google Photos is now much larger than the free space I have on any device. The hassle of downloading in chunks, just to re-upload (and heaven help anyone on an ISP with data caps) is huge. It's also probably very slow - consider the bandwidth between an Apple and a Google server - most likely in the 10Gbps range? Compare that with an average person doing 50Mbps down and then 8Mbps up. For a 500GB library that takes _hours_.
Denvercoder9 6y ago
> Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload? I'm of the (perhaps cynical) view that Apple is only doing this to satisfy their legal obligations under the GDPR, and GDPR requires direct transfer.

y04nn 6y ago

Please add a way to export Notes also. I've not tried hard to export them because I still can access them, but I would like a way to export them to an archive.

PascLeRasc 6y ago
Ulysses has an AppleScript export to Markdown files, that might work for you.

Maxburn 6y ago

More ways to do this is nice but you could always download and upload. This isn't some amazing new thing that was keeping you from doing that.

graham1776 6y ago

I have the reverse problem...I need to liberate my 600GB of photos from Dropbox into iCloud. Any reccomendations without downloading the entire thing to an external drive and re-uploading?

m463 6y ago

If they're a privacy company, they should just offer a dedicated home server for this sort of thing. personal icloud, with all the apple trimmings. It is ok to sell this to you and charge money.

baby 6y ago

I really really hate how locked I am on the products I own... I pay for Apple music yet I can't play it on my Google home. I use Google maps yet in some apps it forces me to use Apple maps (even though I don't have it installed). I use Google photos, which I can't use to manage my photos in the native way that Apple photos do it. Airdrop only works between Apple devices. I use Chrome and yet some apps will just open links in Safari (iOS).

enos_feedler 6y ago
At least being able to move your photos out of Apple Photos is a step towards not locking you into Apple's ecosystem. I don't think the ultimate goal is removing lock in completely. It's a fools errand to try and defeat it. The goal should be to free you from being locked into a company that takes it too far. This creates free choice and a market opportunity for another business to serve people like you. Also .. I thought Apple Music was added to Google Home? I thought Apple now allows you to choose Google Maps as default mapping app?
- sigjuice 6y ago
  So far, Apple only allows changing the default web browser or email app.

rakoo 6y ago

It is a bit sad to see something as simple as "you can now take your photos and put them where you want" become a newsworthy article. This is yet another demonstration that Digital Feudalism is alive and well, and just like its ancestor, we need to get rid of it by empowering people to be their own self

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Barrin92 6y ago
force protocols to be open would just about do it. People would trivially write cross-service applications on top and we could have an internet where people can freely move data around. Apple and Google would be delegated to the backend and users could choose the clients they want. It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. We're stuck in the 19th century railroad industry.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  > It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. At what point do you become compelled to start transforming your web application into an open protocol?
  - pydry 6y ago
    Maybe at the unicorn mark.
  - barnabee 6y ago
    Certainly any company that relies on “safe harbor” style protections or sells online services (alone or bundled with software) as a subscription should be required to fully open and document the protocol.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      But most SaaS companies don’t make protocols, they make web applications. So I’m not really sure what’s implied by these trivial-to-implement protocols. Having a functional and well documented API isn’t a protocol. An open protocol would be more like a situation where any vendor could implement an “iCloud service”, and any “iCloud client” could connect to any vendors service.

fungiblecog 6y ago

Just give us a ‘download all’ button with the ability to resume in the event of a failure. RSync has been around for a long time why reinvent the wheel for every different service. Welcome to Modern tech - constantly reinventing (square) wheel

fartcannon 6y ago
But if I don't pretend your photos live in an ephemeral 'cloud', instead of where they really are - on my server, how can I trick you into letting me hide them behind a worse-than-even-just-using-FTP webpage. Walled Gardens Must Die.
luplex 6y ago
GDPR gives you this button. You can do a full data request. This was introduced for exactly this usecase, to make it possible to switch service providers. Now only Google needs to be able to read Apple's format.
- safog 6y ago
  Pretty sure even if Google doesn't support it explicitly, you'll have open source tools that can download + re-upload to Google.
  - lupire 6y ago
    That assumes Google provides API and authorizes the access, or else you're stuck scraping complex web apps with a Chrome extension. Custom 3rd party software is usually banned from a consumer cloud API for security reasons.
    - safog 6y ago
      I'd say it's pretty common with cloud providers actually. Bring in data? (Spotify playlists, Photos, Contacts etc. etc.) come on in, we have great APIs. Want to take your data out? File a GDPR request and get it in some opaque format. No incentive for Google to explicitly refuse photos from Apple for example.

pentae 6y ago

Would love to see this come to Apple Notes, it'd be great to be able to export just for backup purposes

philposting 6y ago
There’s this nice app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12

moron4hire 6y ago

Aaaw, thanks Apple. You're a mensch. -_-

abhayhegde 6y ago

Mind you, Google's free plan gives only 15GB space. Purchasing larger space requires unnecessary monthly expense. Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution.

comeonseriously 6y ago
Yes, because iCloud and Google Photos shouldn't be considered the only piece to a backup solution.
treesknees 6y ago
Google's storage plans start at $19.99/year for 100GB. For less than a cup of coffee every month I'm able to back up my photos wherever I am, search across photos, share them easily with iOS and Android users, easily buy larger prints and photo books. Yes, there's the fact that Google scans photos. I personally find it really useful to search for an object or face in Google Photos that other services just don't do as well. >Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution Well of course that's true. Nothing will beat owning a physical copy of your files in terms of backups/reliability in the worst cases. But you can always do both. Upload to the cloud and perform periodic account takeouts of your photos and store them to disk.

comeonseriously 6y ago

I want them to support smb. I would like to be able to sync my photos to a network share. This doesn't mean I wouldn't still buy iCloud space.

vishnumohandas 6y ago

If Apple opened up their APIs so that data could be imported by ANY authorized third party service, that would be fantastic. This post is about a behind-closed-doors deal with Google. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see a reason to celebrate.

varispeed 6y ago
They have to do it by law (GDPR) if they want to sell their products in the EU. People should start making complaints that they cannot port their data to other services, then they should implement that in no time.
- vishnumohandas 6y ago
  > People should start making complaints Do you know how to go about this? Thanks!

varispeed 6y ago

They don't do any favour. They are supposed to allow it by law because of GDPR. If GDPR was not passed, I personally doubt Apple would do anything. They should allow export not only to Google Photos but also for yourself to download in a way that you could import it to any other photo storage service.

chrisshroba 6y ago
How are they obligated by GDPR to support server side data transfer to Google in particular? My understanding is that they are only required to make it possible for you to download your data so that you can upload it elsewhere if you'd like to.
- varispeed 6y ago
  https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/right-to-data-portability/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... The right to data portability allows individuals to obtain and reuse their personal data for their own purposes across different services. It allows them to move, copy or transfer personal data easily from one IT environment to another in a safe and secure way, without affecting its usability. It doesn't say that they have to implement moving from one provider to another without you having to download the data, but I think the key phrase is "easily from one IT environment to another in a safe and secure way, without affecting its usability".

rsync 6y ago

Does rclone[1] interface with iCloud Photos ? It works just fine with google photos[2] ... Without installing rclone and without using any of your own bandwidth, you should be able to: ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah gphotos:/blah Or maybe you just want to keep a copy in your rsync.net account: ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah /your/dir/tree [1] https://rclone.org https://rclone.org [2] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/ https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

jdxcode 6y ago
iCloud photos aren’t just jpegs in a directory
- rsync 6y ago
  Take a look at the rclone targets list: https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/ In fact, most of them are not files in a directory - that's what makes most of the rclone use-cases so impressive. If they can interact with gdrive/photos/S3/etc. they should be able to interact with iCloud Photos ...
atdt 6y ago
Frustratingly, support for Google Photos in rclone is handicapped by the limitations of the Google Photos API: you can't download Photos at original resolution. This is documented on your second link.
- rsync 6y ago
  That's unfortunate ... and I believe there are some other end-user ("consumer") products that also interfere with the direct mechanism that 'rclone' uses to request data.
oarsinsync 6y ago
> It works just fine with google photos Second line in your link: > NB The Google Photos API which rclone uses has quite a few limitations, so please read the limitations[0] section carefully to make sure it is suitable for your use. For anyone intending to use rclone to download their photos from Google Photos, be aware that you will lose EXIF data. If you download videos, they will be lower quality. There are more limitations in the link. [0] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

iso1631 6y ago

So I could transfer from icloud to google then import into digikam. Interesting Why can't I just download a zip from icloud with my 13,000 photos/videos inside? Where's the API?

GNU_James 6y ago

>Lets You Ye, no. I still spit on them.

sullysaas 6y ago

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..

steren 6y ago
I have 400GB in Google Photos, and I am able to use Google Takeout to download them as multiple archives. I try to back them every 1/2 years on a hard drive. Since I assume you are a Google One user. Maybe contact support and share your issue?
trimbo 6y ago
Does it actually miss data that should be there or does the Takeout fail?
elcomet 6y ago
Did you try rclone ?
- anaganisk 6y ago
  Rclone can't download original quality files from google photos(API limitation)
  - elcomet 6y ago
    Thanks, I had no idea.

hankchinaski 6y ago

i wanted to do the exact opposite, moving photos from Google to apple icloud but google takeout exports are a complete mess

jw14 6y ago

When is google going to offer to transfer my photos to iCloud? I've done it using their export.. it was a nightmare. Dates aren't preserved.

Clampower 6y ago

Does anybody have a way do something like this from Google photos to a different host? I really want a second copy of stuff on Google photos, and takeout is completely unusable for me.

cryptoquick 6y ago

What, so Google can just go ahead and delete them?

seaman1921 6y ago
please reserve such comments to reddit

kccqzy 6y ago

> Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo. This is actually a dealbreaker. When I edit a photo, I expect the service to store both the original and the edited version, so that I can revert the edit or just look at the original version straight from the camera at any time. I have actually went back and looked at old edited photos I took, and found the edits to be way too heavy handed (too much contrast, too much saturation, etc) than I'd prefer today. One's taste as a photographer grows and changes.

dzhiurgis 6y ago

Still missing Google Photos as offloading service. Which seems blatantly illegal. p.s. I'd love to use iCloud if it wasn't so slow and buggy (watching old videos on Mac is basically a chore).

Pokepokalypse 6y ago

That's the last fucking place I want my photos. When you run out of space, you're screwed.

subpixel 6y ago

Funny reading this while Apple re-uploads my entire 10+ year photo library _from an external drive_ back to iCloud after I fresh-installed Big Sur.

ftio 6y ago
Protip: go the other direction. I've found that re-downloading the whole thing into a new library is >10x faster than resyncing your local 'originals' with iCloud. I have no idea why this is, but I've done the 'download' method twice, and it has been so much faster and more reliable (and less stressful).

Black101 6y ago

next thing, they will let you hold the copyright for your own pictures...

sdfjkl 6y ago

My photos are on my drive in a bunch of messy folders and I can transfer them wherever I want. Get your filthy clouds off my lawn.

owaislone 6y ago
I so want to go back to this but after losing two of my 2 TB drives got corrupted in the past 15 years and now I'm scared of leaving everything on a drive. Perhaps a cheap S3 deep archive storage + a physical drive as main storage is the answer but then I won't have an app like Google Photos which is actually pretty great especially for sharing with family.

owaislone 6y ago

Unrelated but does anyone know if the partner sharing photos in Google Photos costs double the storage? I know I can view my partners photos in the app but there is a "save" feature which allows me to save my partners photos to my own "galley". Does that mean the photo counts towards my Google One storage twice? I think it doesn't but I'm not sure.

donatzsky 6y ago
Pretty sure it only counts if you save them to your own library. Also, if you don't save them before turning off partner sharing, they'll disappear.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Truth is I don't want anything to be uploaded to Google, Apple or any other cloud. I want everything to go straight to my own server!

smasher164 6y ago
If iOS supported Time Machine backups, my NAS backup solution would be complete. It's crazy that we're either locked into iCloud or have to sync with iTunes. Yes, I know about iTunes Wifi backup, but I'd rather not be on my home network for this.

Ecko123 6y ago

Improving their ML models with more data.

punnerud 6y ago

This is probably the effect of GDPR Article 20: “(..) the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible.“ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

asimpletune 6y ago

Wow that’s awesome, now I wish they’d add Amazon Photos as well.

batmaniam 6y ago

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.

swiley 6y ago

How about letting us just download a targz of them? Why is this so hard?

jqquah 6y ago

Now we just need to be able to transfer iCloud backup of Whatsapp to Google Drive

WhyNotHugo 6y ago

Curious to see this evolve. Article seems to hint that it's just Google Photos "for now", but that may change in future. I'd love to have it as a backup mechanism to dump all my photos onto an external hard drive. Doing it now is pretty non-trivial unless you have a mac.