8 ms·

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

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

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