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Apple frustrates the hell out of me with their deceptive tactics to create walled gardens while pretending not to. They feign ignorance to keep you stuck and cr
by brink 3y ago
Apple frustrates the hell out of me with their deceptive tactics to create walled gardens while pretending not to. They feign ignorance to keep you stuck and create the illusion of open doors out of their walled garden that are actually broken and they have no interest in fixing.
I've been paying for iCloud for my wife's iphone for the last several months because of how difficult Apple makes it for us to export our photos. Copying them off the phone with a usb cable is nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook, exporting them off of the website is nearly impossible if you have over 1k photos.. meanwhile google takeout allows me to download all of my photos in my browser in a couple clicks. In my experience, it feels like Apple makes getting out of their walled garden as difficult as legally possible.
- londons_explore 3y agoDo they have a GDPR-like process where you can just export a .zip file of all your data?
- mruszczyk 3y agoThere is an option to request a copy of your data at: https://privacy.apple.com/ https://privacy.apple.com/
- kstrauser 3y agoI exported my 27,000 photos to my Synology as a backup. There's not an inherent limit that makes what you're asking impossible.
- applied_heat 3y agoWhat did you use to do that?
- kstrauser 3y agoIt has a Photos app that runs on the NAS, and there's a free iPhone app that connects to it.
- rubatuga 3y agoNot the answer you want but with an iPhone backup you can extract all the images .
- lawgimenez 3y agoI exported all my iCloud photos and videos to Google Photos. https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10502587?hl=en https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10502587?hl=en
- teeray 3y agoI just want the auto-sync experience of iCloud photos to my own NAS. Paying Apple $2.99/mo forever just so I can have an offsite backup of my photos is so obnoxious.
- jcurbo 3y agohttps://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... works great for me to do this.
- brink 3y agoI'll give this a shot, thank you!
- asdflmao 3y ago[flagged]
- smoldesu 3y ago> Could you really expect a company to justify the kind of work Well they certainly justified it to support their own first-party service just fine. So... yes?
- sircastor 3y agoSo the parent got flagged after I did the math. I hope you don't mind my posting it here just to qualify what the justification looks like: The exaggerated use-case: 0.0000000001% is: 0.000000000001 (10^-12) Multiplied by 1,460,000,000 ---- 0.00146 persons. And we already know that there are at least 2 people (myself and parent up there) who are interested in that. This is off by a factor of 1000. I'm willing to guess that it's actually off by a factor of at least 1,000,000, possibly 10,000,000. It seems completely reasonable to me that we could find in the entire world of iPhone users 146,000 people who would want to setup their own photos backup. All of this is simply to say that the user base is absolutely massive, and we need to appreciate how huge it is. Even a very very small subset of users represents a very large number of actual people. [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users (further upstream sources are provided there)
- hylaride 3y agoSome googling would find you several ways to do this (directly on the phone to external storage is possible, but yeah selecting all the photos on the iphone sucks as you have to click one and scroll-select them all): https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph480caa1f3/ios https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph480caa1f3/io... The easiest way is to export them via photos for mac. If you don't have a mac, then there's ways to get the photos on a PC: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201302#importpc https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201302#importpc You can also setup icloud on windows and download them, then move them wherever. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/108994 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/108994 You can also connect the phone direct to PC and download them. So it's not nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook.
- fundad 3y agoI feel like “lock-in” means any reason they buy something
- yolo3000 3y agoIf you have a Mac the easiest is to use the Image Capture app, which comes preinstalled. A lot better than the Photos app, in my experience.
- ramones13 3y agoWhich hits the problem pretty well, right? To do something efficiently on an iPhone, buy a Mac.
- yolo3000 3y agoI was trying to be helpful. I was responding to someone else who said they have a Mac. But, if you want to relate it to the title, I don't believe there's any technical limitation to developing an app for Windows that can help you transfer files from an Iphone. And as far as I remember, the Android transfer app on Windows (or maybe Mac) is pretty bad as well. Maybe the issue is that there's no money to be made from this, so nobody develops nicer apps. In general I do agree that Iphones are easier integrated with Macs, I personally don't have a problem with that
- samatman 3y agoIt's amusing how often you see this sort of substantive claim which can be trivially disproven. "Apple operates a walled garden! I can't get my photos out of iCloud!" [half a dozen ways to get the photos off the phone are proffered] "Well. Nevertheless!"
- kstrauser 3y agoTrue. It's one thing to say "I can't do a thing", and another to say "thing can't be done".
- mcfedr 3y agoBut none of them work like iCloud. No one but Apple is allowed to make an app that reliably ships your photos to the cloud.
- samatman 3y agoThe original comment was about exporting photos, and how "Apple makes it difficult". Which they do not. Syncing is a different story, let's see how this holds up: If you want to sync your iPhone's photos to Dropbox, you give Dropbox permission to access the Photos library and it syncs. https://www.multcloud.com/tutorials/sync-iphone-photos-to-dropbox-1003.html https://www.multcloud.com/tutorials/sync-iphone-photos-to-dr... The company hosting that URL offers a product for syncing between various clouds, I haven't used it but it does exist. https://www.multcloud.com/download https://www.multcloud.com/download So I guess this is another one of those things that just isn't true. Go figure.
- sneak 3y agoNot really. For Dropbox, Nextcloud, Photo Sync, et c to upload your photos, the app needs to remain open; it can't upload in the background for more than a minute or so. This means that only iCloud can do real background syncing. If you want to upload a full camera roll to a non-iCloud service, you're in for a world of frustration. You'll have to disable screenlock and put the phone on a power cord and leave it open with the app up for hours and hours. Of course iCloud doesn't have such limitations. No non-Apple app is allowed to do background sync, no matter what you install. They have put iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos in a privileged position.
- nouryqt 3y agoIf you're on linux I can only recommend ifuse with the libimobiledevice package. I followed the guide on the arch wiki[0] and could simply mount my iPhone to a directory[1] and then just drag and drop them over. For some reason there were 1000 pictures per folder so I had a few different folders, but otherwise it was super simple. [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Manual_mounting https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Manual_mounting
- badrequest 3y agoThis is like that comment on the launch post for Dropbox all over again.
- Spivak 3y agoLook, they're clearly trying to help someone deal with a real problem using the tools available today. They're out here offering someone sunscreen and you're mad they're not yelling at God instead.
- skyyler 3y agoThe Dropbox comment was a highly technical person belittling an app without realising that it solves problems for normal people. They thought that normal people would have no problem finding and purchasing a managed FTP service, mount it with curlftpfs, and then use SVN to get a Dropbox-like service. The comment you’re responding to is a technical person offering advice on a way out of a sticky situation to another (assumed) technical person. It didn’t feel like they were trying to say that the average person should be able to read archwiki and use libimobiledevice to pull pictures off an iPhone… but I could be misreading the situation
- nouryqt 3y agoDefinitely didn't want to come across as belittling or anything. Just stumbled on that tool a few weeks ago when I tried to backup my iPhone photos and was surprised how well it worked and how painless it was. Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, but I had no bad intentions, just wanted to tell what worked for me.
- khazhoux 3y agoI simply installed Google Photos app and now every single iphone photo is automatically synced to my google account. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.
- mrtksn 3y agoDo you have to open the Google Photos app to sync or you set it and forget it, like take a photo and in a few moments its available everywhere?
- mcfedr 3y agoYou have to open it at least every few days. Only Apple apps can work reliably on iOS.
- trevoragilbert 3y agoYou can just let it run.
- albumen 3y agoUnless things have changed, yes but no. You have to leave the app running, and turn off display sleep/lock so the phone is always awake. Which practically means it has to be plugged in. It's a major pain. As someone else commented, a classic example of Apple limiting background sync in the name of "stability and battery life". That has a grain of truth to it, but let users make that choice!
- userabchn 3y agoI also suspect that there isn't an easy way to reduce the resolution that the default iPhone camera app takes photographs at (that I could find) because Apple wants them to be big so that you will need to buy cloud storage.
- kstrauser 3y agoYou mean other than Settings > Camera > Formats > Photo Mode? Of the reasons I can imagine why Apple might want the camera to default to its best settings, "sell moar cloud" isn't in the top 10.
- buildbot 3y agoThey also don’t default to RAW, which uses like 60-80mb a shot with 48mp! That does use storage quite fast!
- abawany 3y agoan option for easy backup in addition to the already-mentioned google photos is to use a hosted nextcloud instance (hetzner, shadow.tech) to backup photos from your phone. the nextcloud app available on the ios store will backup to the configured remote nextcloud instance and the corresponding nextcloud app on your laptop etc. can then sync these photos to you.
- fakedang 3y agoI want to add how much difficult Apple makes it to delete content in general from an iPhone. Deleting simple things like email, which are just a swipe away on Android, are notoriously difficult on the native email app, simply because Apple doesn't give a fuck. And this is the company touted as some design genius? I think it's all a ploy to just grab more users for iCloud, or get users to upscale to a higher storage on their next iPhone.
- AnonHP 3y ago> Deleting simple things like email, which are just a swipe away on Android, are notoriously difficult on the native email app, Not sure what exactly you’re talking about, because deleting an email (from the mailbox list) is a long swipe to the left on iOS/iPadOS too, unless you have changed the settings for that to archive the mail instead of deleting. It has been this way for a very long time.
- kstrauser 3y agoThis thread has me feeling like I'm taking crazy pills. There are many things people can plausibly criticize Apple about, but these aren't among them. These complaints sound like the equivalent of "Apple won't let you use your own email server", or "Safari only loads apple.com web pages". Can't archive photos? Can't delete emails? Are these people even talking about the same iPhone I have that can do all those things?
- tempodox 3y ago> as difficult as legally possible. I don‘t think they care much about legality. When called out, they drag their feet with malicious compliance.
- samstave 3y ago>to create walled gardens while pretending not to. So ironically juxtaposed to the original 1984 Apple Commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
- Terretta 3y agoI have ~200K photos in iCloud and do not have this problem of exporting, I “export” regularly onto new backup media. However, I don't really export, I turn on iCloud Photos on Windows and set it to store on an external media with sufficient space (over 2TB now) and then tell it to locally store all media in full quality. https://support.apple.com/en-us/108994 https://support.apple.com/en-us/108994 Once it's synced, I have a local folder with all the media. I have accomplished an export. Then I can turn it off, remove the media, and go back to a c:\ folder and not saving locally. Now, you wanted without iCloud, so then, Windows 10 or newer? Microsoft has a phone companion that can pull things, or there's file explorer for just photos. But absent iCloud, what I've done is run OneDrive on the iPhone, and let that mirror everything to OneDrive. (An alternative used to be Amazon Photos, but I can't keep track of their business model, and Google Photos I can't keep track of what makes them decide to replace my originals with badly compressed alternatives.) I sort of don't understand buying an iPhone, though, if you're not buying into the ecosystem. The ecosystem is the point. The ease of use of iCloud, the paired camera roll for your family (not same thing as shared albums), the family sharing of apps and subscriptions, the bring-your-own domain email with "hide my email" throwaway accounts to put into spammy sites, it's all there increasingly seamless, increasingly secure, and none of it is selling you out into third party ad-tech. If you're not into that, there are other phone systems and operating systems and other hardware all grounded on different and separate principles. There's only one place for a cohesive coherent curated "don't make me think" peace of mind, and consumers should have a right to choose that since it stands alone in opposition to the DIY bricolage everyone else offers.
- ValentineC 3y ago> meanwhile google takeout allows me to download all of my photos in my browser in a couple clicks. Note that apparently Google Takeout doesn't give bit-identical files [1], which may be important for some (like me). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571747
- perryizgr8 3y ago> Copying them off the phone with a usb cable is nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook Even if you have a macbook, it is not much better. The photos app kept crashing on me if I tried to copy more than 500 photos. Also, copying to photos is not enough, you need to export everything too. And that messed up the metadata so bad for me. Iphone is useless as a camera to me. There is simply no way to get original quality photos and videos out of it. What good is camera if you can't access the media you shot?
- kovacs_x 3y agoI sync my photos from iphone using dropbox. very simple and effective, no neeed for icloud / iphotos.
- harkinian 3y agoDoesn't the iPhone present itself just like a camera to any PC? So you can use whatever you'd normally use on Mac or Windows to download the pics.
- harkinian 3y agoGuess it's less obvious than some Android phones, which mount as a filesystem. But most of them don't.