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I started moving my things out of Apple two years ago. Two years on, I'm still entrenched in a few places. I can tell you, Apple does everything they can to k

I started moving my things out of Apple two years ago. Two years on, I'm still entrenched in a few places. I can tell you, Apple does everything they can to keep you in. Slow download rates, surprisingly frequent failed downloads from iCloud.com, requesting your data from Apple takes at least a week while they put it together, etc. One of last form of lock-in that I'm struggling with is iCloud Photo Library. A service that has been a blessing and a curse. I've been saving my photos there for the better part of a decade. I'm working on getting my photos out (first by requesting my data from Apple, then from iCloud Drive on Windows) and I'm appalled - everything gets dumped into one directory. Inconsistent file naming. Timestamps not always accurate, and "Date Taken" seems to have disappeared from a number of my photos. Albums are not included (unless you count them being a list dumped into a csv). All of that data is kept inside iCloud.. only for them- not for you. So what comes next is a long journey to re-organize all of my photos by year, month. I'm not even sure if my Hidden photos got copied over. This is all 100% a dark pattern to keep users locked into Apple. How many people would get this far? Not many- my wife would have given up at having to request her data from Apple. Then how many would stop when they find out all of your photos get dumped into a single directory (30k photos!) if you try to leave? All of this is to say, I'm done with Apple. I want control of my data, not this circus show.

majou 4y ago
Consider using ifuse from https://libimobiledevice.org/ https://libimobiledevice.org/ to access the SQLite database with all your Photos metadata.
firecall 4y ago
I'm deep into the Apple ecosystem. However my sentiment/thinking isn't far behind yours... I haven't made any serious moves to decouple and go independent and self-hosted. Mostly due to the overheads of dealing with it all, and knowing I have other things to do that actually earn me money, My photos I do sync to multiple sources, and files are an easy one. I could ditch Apple and Google and survive. I'd have to take my medicine and it wouldn't be pleasant at first, but I could do it.
Renaud 4y ago
I recently help family set up their Synology NAS as a photo station and it works fairly well. A dedicated photo folder can be shared amongst users but each user can also have their private repository in their home directory. Pictures are accessed by the NAS webapp or a desicated Photo app on mobile. The app has a fast mode to backup existing files so you can leave it on overnight for the first backup. Downloaded pictures are sorted in year/month folders and it does decent face recognition (not as well as Apple though) and will use geo localisation data for maps and for keywords search of locations. Apple photo data processing is much better at autotagging pictures, and it’s probably going to be difficult or impossible to find something as good, but at least your pictures stay private and remain accessible wherever you are.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  The thing that gets me is the autotagging data is kept by Apple. You don't get to have it, when you leave.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  How do you sync photos from iOS to the Synology? I didn't know that was an option.
  - msh 4y ago
    Synology have a app you can install on the phone.
mtn92 4y ago
I always have the same issue when copying files over from my iPhone to my Windows PC, all photos are given a random name. They really do their best to keep you locked in. However, if you are lucky files might still preserve the modification timestamp from the time they were created. I use a little script to rename all those files chronologically. I'm sharing it below if it helps ;) https://github.com/monti-python/utils/blob/master/rename_chronologically.py https://github.com/monti-python/utils/blob/master/rename_chr...
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  I wrote a little script in PowerShell myself, and what I found was modification times were wildly incorrect. Creation time couldn't be relied on because it would default to the day it was copied over. The script checks the EXIF data for "Date Taken", and was able to reduce the number of pictures I needed to sort from 30k to around 4k left. That's still a lot of photos to sort through, though.
microtonal 4y ago
I'm working on getting my photos out (first by requesting my data from Apple, then from iCloud Drive on Windows) and I'm appalled - everything gets dumped into one directory. Inconsistent file naming. Timestamps not always accurate, and "Date Taken" seems to have disappeared from a number of my photos. Thank you for posting this! We currently use organized Dropbox folders, but we were considering to use the new Family Album functionality. This sounds like we'd regret this in the future. I am not sure if it is malice on Apple's part though. They have traditionally been bad at cloud services. It sounds like export is a hacky half-working implementation, which sounds like most of iCloud...
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  > I am not sure if it is malice on Apple's part though. They have traditionally been bad at cloud services. With a market cap of 2.2T, I don't think they have a good excuse at this point. Traditionally bad at this point is negligence. They certainly have the money to "do the right thing", but they won't.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    There is no money in committing engineers to feature that helps people leave your platform, it's as simple as that. It's for profit company. There is no "do right thing" in their dictionary
  - microtonal 4y ago
    Well, these outcomes are not only driven by money or incentives to lock in users. A dysfunctional organization in the services group would also lead to the outcomes we see. I mean, look at Google. Constantly launching and abandoning chat apps is not in their or their user's interest. But their organization is such that launching new features is better for your career than polishing what exists. Looking more broadly at Apple, it suffers from the same issues. We often get a bunch of new features, but they are never really polished like they used to (like we now have a bunch of half-working ways to manage windows). Not to pull the Steve Jobs card, but I think when he was annoyed by a lack of polish he'd force teams so work on that rather than chasing features.
daitangio 4y ago
Thank you for sharing. I think Apple wants to replace Facebook advertising with its own, isn't it? I am fighting Apple with Microsoft. I pay for 300GB iPhone Family backup, but I am moving all my other data on OneDrive+Office365. It costs a bit more (50€/yearly) but at least I avoid lock-in on a single provider. I have experienced issue while trying to download all my photos on my Mac: it seems iPhoto does not really download them until you try to open them, one by one. It seems it try to avoid you own all your photos on a local drive/single iPhone (cfr "optimize storage" functionality on low-mem iPhones)!
galaktus 4y ago
> This is all 100% a dark pattern to keep users locked into Apple. Quite a bold statement that it is like that to lock in users. I highly doubt that. This is rather negligence as Apple still has a hard time to catch up with the main product features.
- xu_ituairo 4y ago
  I imagine it’s selective negligence. I doubt making the off-boarding experience super is high on their priority list, so it becomes as good as a dark pattern.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    Have you tried 'offboarding' 200gb of photos and videos from icloud photo library?
    - msh 4y ago
      Its easy if you have a mac. Set the photo app to store originals on disc and you can just copy the files out of the photo folder.
      - deafpolygon 4y ago
        I don't have a Mac. In fact, an overwhelming majority of people don't use Macs. Apple knows this. Only ~15% are MacOS users worldwide according to this: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202110-202210 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
        msh 4y ago
        There are several good and not so great ways to do off boarding from icloud. - Use a mac. - If you have your photos on your ios device you can connect it as a camera to windows or linux and copy the files off. - If you use google photos, onedrive, dropbox, synology or any other file storage app that can auto upload photos you can do it that way - you can install icloud for windows and use that to sync photos. Its in my experience super slow for large amounts of photos but works. - You can request zip downloads from icloud. - You can initiate a server to server transfer from icloud to google photos.
grwthckrmstr 4y ago
Perhaps Proton ecosystem is a viable alternative? https://proton.me/drive https://proton.me/drive
msh 4y ago
Its simple to do proper photo export if you have a mac, hard if you dont. If you set photos to store originals on disk you get a nice year/month directory structure with proper metadata that you can copy around.
beaker52 4y ago
It’s funny because I’m just onboarding into the Apple eco-system. I’m happily leveraging all their services. I’m escaping Google after 15+ years. I swear it’s just a game of keeping yourself busy switching from this to that.
radicality 4y ago
For photos, I could perhaps recommend the following sequence: 1) Get an apple device where you're able to sync the _whole_ photos albums. This can be on an external drive, you can relocate the main library there. Make sure to select the option to download full pics and not to optimize storage. 2) Use this library help parse the photos.db database and write out your data however you wish (by album, or whatever). https://pypi.org/project/osxphotos/ https://pypi.org/project/osxphotos/ I believe you can also do 2) just by itself and it will download photos as required, but I would still recommend fetching the whole photos library via Photos first.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Two issues: - I don't have OSX - I don't have an Apple iDevice capable of storing my entire Photos library.
- mprime1 4y ago
  You can actually skip #2, I f you set ‘full library download’ all originals are downloaded to your library folder. Easy enough to take them elsewhere. I do this so all my pictures are included in my (off-Apple) backups.
  - radicality 4y ago
    Yeah, that's true, but there's still a use case for it imo. I have hundreds of manually created albums, lots of Smart Albums with various criteria etc. That python module gives you a lot of control if you want to say export only specific albums, or say batch process a few hundred albums and export them somewhere else. The Photos app 'Export' option is quite limited.
- vintagedave 4y ago
  > sync the _whole_ photos albums This sounds like a dumb question, but it's exactly what I want to do but haven't figured out how for a couple of years. How do you do that? I have the Photos app, and sync many pictures to it. I can sync from Photos to cloud. But how do I make it _download_ all photos that are on iCloud to my Photos app? I tend to feel worried with syncing in case something is deleted, not added. I haven't spotted any clear non-destructive sync option. I likely misunderstand the UI.
orange_fritter 4y ago
I lost about 6 years of photos through boring laziness. A few years ago, I canceled my extra iCloud storage. Photos that I assumed were stored on my phone, because I was looking at them on my phone, were immediately deleted. I should have downloaded everything to a hard drive where I could see the files offline, but it was a pain(intentionally?) so I didn't.
emiliosic 4y ago
Apple has an iCloud connector for Windows. Wouldn't that work for you? For some of my pictures and media in general, I like Plex very much.
wink 4y ago
And on the other hand there are many (dozens!) of us who are sick of Android and the phones never getting any security patches if you buy from a random well-known brand, or on the other side just the possibility of buying directly from Google (shudder, what if I have to contact support) - Pixel phones, which cost a ton. I don't even really care about my data (in the sense that I treat the things on my phone as 90% volatile, I backup my photos and that's it), as long as it's not in a public s3 bucket, it's fine. I've not tried it, but the thought of getting one phone and if I don't break it getting consistent security updates for 4 years sounds very enticing...

majou 4y ago

Consider using ifuse from https://libimobiledevice.org/ https://libimobiledevice.org/ to access the SQLite database with all your Photos metadata.

firecall 4y ago

I'm deep into the Apple ecosystem. However my sentiment/thinking isn't far behind yours... I haven't made any serious moves to decouple and go independent and self-hosted. Mostly due to the overheads of dealing with it all, and knowing I have other things to do that actually earn me money, My photos I do sync to multiple sources, and files are an easy one. I could ditch Apple and Google and survive. I'd have to take my medicine and it wouldn't be pleasant at first, but I could do it.

Renaud 4y ago

I recently help family set up their Synology NAS as a photo station and it works fairly well. A dedicated photo folder can be shared amongst users but each user can also have their private repository in their home directory. Pictures are accessed by the NAS webapp or a desicated Photo app on mobile. The app has a fast mode to backup existing files so you can leave it on overnight for the first backup. Downloaded pictures are sorted in year/month folders and it does decent face recognition (not as well as Apple though) and will use geo localisation data for maps and for keywords search of locations. Apple photo data processing is much better at autotagging pictures, and it’s probably going to be difficult or impossible to find something as good, but at least your pictures stay private and remain accessible wherever you are.

deafpolygon 4y ago
The thing that gets me is the autotagging data is kept by Apple. You don't get to have it, when you leave.
dividedbyzero 4y ago
How do you sync photos from iOS to the Synology? I didn't know that was an option.
- msh 4y ago
  Synology have a app you can install on the phone.

mtn92 4y ago

I always have the same issue when copying files over from my iPhone to my Windows PC, all photos are given a random name. They really do their best to keep you locked in. However, if you are lucky files might still preserve the modification timestamp from the time they were created. I use a little script to rename all those files chronologically. I'm sharing it below if it helps ;) https://github.com/monti-python/utils/blob/master/rename_chronologically.py https://github.com/monti-python/utils/blob/master/rename_chr...

deafpolygon 4y ago
I wrote a little script in PowerShell myself, and what I found was modification times were wildly incorrect. Creation time couldn't be relied on because it would default to the day it was copied over. The script checks the EXIF data for "Date Taken", and was able to reduce the number of pictures I needed to sort from 30k to around 4k left. That's still a lot of photos to sort through, though.

microtonal 4y ago

I'm working on getting my photos out (first by requesting my data from Apple, then from iCloud Drive on Windows) and I'm appalled - everything gets dumped into one directory. Inconsistent file naming. Timestamps not always accurate, and "Date Taken" seems to have disappeared from a number of my photos. Thank you for posting this! We currently use organized Dropbox folders, but we were considering to use the new Family Album functionality. This sounds like we'd regret this in the future. I am not sure if it is malice on Apple's part though. They have traditionally been bad at cloud services. It sounds like export is a hacky half-working implementation, which sounds like most of iCloud...

deafpolygon 4y ago
> I am not sure if it is malice on Apple's part though. They have traditionally been bad at cloud services. With a market cap of 2.2T, I don't think they have a good excuse at this point. Traditionally bad at this point is negligence. They certainly have the money to "do the right thing", but they won't.
- ilyt 4y ago
  There is no money in committing engineers to feature that helps people leave your platform, it's as simple as that. It's for profit company. There is no "do right thing" in their dictionary
- microtonal 4y ago
  Well, these outcomes are not only driven by money or incentives to lock in users. A dysfunctional organization in the services group would also lead to the outcomes we see. I mean, look at Google. Constantly launching and abandoning chat apps is not in their or their user's interest. But their organization is such that launching new features is better for your career than polishing what exists. Looking more broadly at Apple, it suffers from the same issues. We often get a bunch of new features, but they are never really polished like they used to (like we now have a bunch of half-working ways to manage windows). Not to pull the Steve Jobs card, but I think when he was annoyed by a lack of polish he'd force teams so work on that rather than chasing features.

daitangio 4y ago

Thank you for sharing. I think Apple wants to replace Facebook advertising with its own, isn't it? I am fighting Apple with Microsoft. I pay for 300GB iPhone Family backup, but I am moving all my other data on OneDrive+Office365. It costs a bit more (50€/yearly) but at least I avoid lock-in on a single provider. I have experienced issue while trying to download all my photos on my Mac: it seems iPhoto does not really download them until you try to open them, one by one. It seems it try to avoid you own all your photos on a local drive/single iPhone (cfr "optimize storage" functionality on low-mem iPhones)!

galaktus 4y ago

> This is all 100% a dark pattern to keep users locked into Apple. Quite a bold statement that it is like that to lock in users. I highly doubt that. This is rather negligence as Apple still has a hard time to catch up with the main product features.

xu_ituairo 4y ago
I imagine it’s selective negligence. I doubt making the off-boarding experience super is high on their priority list, so it becomes as good as a dark pattern.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Have you tried 'offboarding' 200gb of photos and videos from icloud photo library?
  - msh 4y ago
    Its easy if you have a mac. Set the photo app to store originals on disc and you can just copy the files out of the photo folder.
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      I don't have a Mac. In fact, an overwhelming majority of people don't use Macs. Apple knows this. Only ~15% are MacOS users worldwide according to this: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202110-202210 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
      - msh 4y ago
        There are several good and not so great ways to do off boarding from icloud. - Use a mac. - If you have your photos on your ios device you can connect it as a camera to windows or linux and copy the files off. - If you use google photos, onedrive, dropbox, synology or any other file storage app that can auto upload photos you can do it that way - you can install icloud for windows and use that to sync photos. Its in my experience super slow for large amounts of photos but works. - You can request zip downloads from icloud. - You can initiate a server to server transfer from icloud to google photos.

grwthckrmstr 4y ago

Perhaps Proton ecosystem is a viable alternative? https://proton.me/drive https://proton.me/drive

msh 4y ago

Its simple to do proper photo export if you have a mac, hard if you dont. If you set photos to store originals on disk you get a nice year/month directory structure with proper metadata that you can copy around.

beaker52 4y ago

It’s funny because I’m just onboarding into the Apple eco-system. I’m happily leveraging all their services. I’m escaping Google after 15+ years. I swear it’s just a game of keeping yourself busy switching from this to that.

radicality 4y ago

For photos, I could perhaps recommend the following sequence: 1) Get an apple device where you're able to sync the _whole_ photos albums. This can be on an external drive, you can relocate the main library there. Make sure to select the option to download full pics and not to optimize storage. 2) Use this library help parse the photos.db database and write out your data however you wish (by album, or whatever). https://pypi.org/project/osxphotos/ https://pypi.org/project/osxphotos/ I believe you can also do 2) just by itself and it will download photos as required, but I would still recommend fetching the whole photos library via Photos first.

deafpolygon 4y ago
Two issues: - I don't have OSX - I don't have an Apple iDevice capable of storing my entire Photos library.
mprime1 4y ago
You can actually skip #2, I f you set ‘full library download’ all originals are downloaded to your library folder. Easy enough to take them elsewhere. I do this so all my pictures are included in my (off-Apple) backups.
- radicality 4y ago
  Yeah, that's true, but there's still a use case for it imo. I have hundreds of manually created albums, lots of Smart Albums with various criteria etc. That python module gives you a lot of control if you want to say export only specific albums, or say batch process a few hundred albums and export them somewhere else. The Photos app 'Export' option is quite limited.
vintagedave 4y ago
> sync the _whole_ photos albums This sounds like a dumb question, but it's exactly what I want to do but haven't figured out how for a couple of years. How do you do that? I have the Photos app, and sync many pictures to it. I can sync from Photos to cloud. But how do I make it _download_ all photos that are on iCloud to my Photos app? I tend to feel worried with syncing in case something is deleted, not added. I haven't spotted any clear non-destructive sync option. I likely misunderstand the UI.

orange_fritter 4y ago

I lost about 6 years of photos through boring laziness. A few years ago, I canceled my extra iCloud storage. Photos that I assumed were stored on my phone, because I was looking at them on my phone, were immediately deleted. I should have downloaded everything to a hard drive where I could see the files offline, but it was a pain(intentionally?) so I didn't.

emiliosic 4y ago

Apple has an iCloud connector for Windows. Wouldn't that work for you? For some of my pictures and media in general, I like Plex very much.

wink 4y ago

And on the other hand there are many (dozens!) of us who are sick of Android and the phones never getting any security patches if you buy from a random well-known brand, or on the other side just the possibility of buying directly from Google (shudder, what if I have to contact support) - Pixel phones, which cost a ton. I don't even really care about my data (in the sense that I treat the things on my phone as 90% volatile, I backup my photos and that's it), as long as it's not in a public s3 bucket, it's fine. I've not tried it, but the thought of getting one phone and if I don't break it getting consistent security updates for 4 years sounds very enticing...