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.
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.
> 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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the other machines on your LAN include Windows or Linux boxes, you could use Photos.app in a macOS VM to bulk download the files; here are some projects that make it easy:
Admittedly an additional cost/annoyance, it is possible to buy USB-C "docks" that can supply power to your laptop while also plugging in another USB device.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)?
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.
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.
Can you think of any reasons why it would be limited to just those countries? Note that I'm _not_ asking why those countries are nifty. I'm asking what you think Apple gains by limiting it to just those countries in the first place or would lose by not limiting it to just those countries. The feature technology would be the same regardless of where you are, so saying "only available to users in X" seems like an arbitrary restriction. And there are surely orders of magnitude more Apple iCloud users in Japan or India than in Liechtenstein.
Note that the GDPR applies to businesses established in Europe, effectively regardless of the location or nationality of users. For instance, the UK authority recognised a US resident's right to invoke GDPR, during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
If I had to guess, I'd say that Apple and Google probably have a contract that covers how this transfer takes place, and it takes some amount of effort from their legal teams to ensure that it's a valid contract that complies with the laws of each jurisdiction. As a result, they started with the highest-value jurisdictions like the US and EU first.
Regarding Liechtenstein, it is (along with Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland) part of the European Single Market [1] via trade agreements with the EU, so it's possible that it was trivial to adapt whatever contract they were using in the EU to cover them as well. I don't think it's a coincidence that all 4 are on the list -- but again, this is just a guess.
> I'm asking what you think Apple gains by limiting it to just those countries in the first place or would lose by not limiting it to just those countries.
Pretty much all Apple services roll out in phases. From MacWorld Magazine (last year):
> As part of its staggered roll-out, the iPhone 11 launched in a total of 30 countries simultaneously on 20 September 2019. Customers in Israel had to wait another six days; and then the day after that, another 28 countries were added to the list.
When Steve Jobs introduced new products / services, he would have a slide for the first countries in line, then another slide of the next group. Here's an example:
Is there a good reason for the code implementing this to know anything at all about the fact that the world is divided into countries? I don't think there is.
So we can't accept a premise that these are countries that mandate such transfers, because not all of them do. And we can't accept a premise that these are countries that all have the same laws, because not all of them do. And we can't accept a premise that these are the countries whose laws make doing this easy, because many other countries place no obstacles whatsoever. So what other law thing should we be thinking of?
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.
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.
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.
Or you could read DTP site instead of axe-grinding
"DTP is an open source project centered around the idea that less-resourced companies can use and build on the common models and codebase developed by the community of contributors. All companies are welcome to participate."
Checked the home page it says "This approach encourages companies to continue to support data portability, knowing that their proprietary technologies are not threatened by data portability requirements. For a detailed taxonomy of such data, see ISO/IEC 19944:2017."
Went to look for ISO standart, and founs out thet it's status is "Withdrawn"
It's been revised and updated, yes, that means the document is withdrawn but the standard lives on in 19944-1:2020.
"This first edition of ISO/IEC 19944-1, along with ISO/IEC 19944-21 cancels and replaces ISO/IEC 19944:2017, which has been technically revised.
The main changes compared to the previous edition are as follows:
— provides additional material which principally deals with organizational data and the need to treat some organizational data in particular ways in order to ensure confidentiality, integrity and so on,
— the new concept of data facets is introduced and data facets are used to extend the expressiveness of data use statements, including adding the concept of which individuals or organizations have control over data,
— the new data use categories are introduced, including some that address the newer uses of data associated with artificial intelligence systems.
A list of all parts in the ISO/IEC 19944 series can be found on the ISO website."
If you are in the EU, they are by law required to give you access to your data in a way so that you can achieve this. If this is not available then you can make a complaint and maybe sue them, but that costs money.
Stop spreading this incorrect info. You already have access to this data on both Google Photos and iCloud Photos. The only notable thing is that Apple is offering to perform the transfer for you.
It's not just the .zip file. You can transfer all your photos, in original quality, to Google and that includes all metadata. The only notable thing that has changed is that Apple will do it for you, not because of GPDR, but because they're part of the Data Transfer Project.
This is quite elaborately dishonest as data portability is one of the requirements of GDPR that came to life in 2018. It's not like suddenly those giants decided to be good companies and allowed data transfer between services. It looks like they use it as a PR piece and at the same time trying to ensure that users won't flock to competition that has not signed to their thing.
I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. The fact that companies can sell their regulatory obligations as a positive PR move is the carrot to get them to do it well and be proud of it. Stick only is how you get half-assed left to rot technically compliant implementations.
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.
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.
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...
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".
Yup, when I do my quarterly "Takeout everything" I always separate the photos request out because it takes 3-4 attempts to get it to work. Every single other service? Almost always works first time, even when they're all combined. Photos is the problem child.
I recently moved photos from google photos to icloud using google takeout and it removed meta data from the vast majority of my photos.
Photos with correct dates and locations in google photos not longer have any of that data in icloud. Makes icloud photos a lot less usable, not sure if anyone else has had this issue (can't find any articles on it)
Anyways agree that google takeout needs improvement.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
On the web site, go to "explore" and pick the face of either dog, it should offer a little button that says "Same or different?" that will give you an opportunity to train it.
> A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon
Google has always charged for storage in Google Photos - it's part of your "Google Drive" storage quota. They do give you 10GB free though, which can be substantial for a lot of folks.
I was under the impression that was only for Pixel phone owners - I suppose I was mistaken!
Although low resolution image uploads doesn't seem very useful for most people. The point of cloud storage is peace of mind to keep your data safe... and to me that implies the original photos not reduced resolution photos.
Photos.app search has drastically improved ever since it started to use AI. I believe it was a search for "paper" that I did not too long ago, and which came up with several photos that were practically where-is-waldo games for me trying to find the paper.
Workaround: install the Google Opinion Rewards app which is even available on iPhone. It will ask you survey questions about places you have recently visited. (Yes, it tracks you). Over the course of a year, you can earn $20 in "virtual" money which can then be used to purchase the 100GB/year plan.
You can (I do) earn that much without location sharing. But I've been doing it for a long time so I seem to get more surveys than I did at first. Looking at my history, I average just shy of 1.75/month.
Search is a mixed bag: Google configured it with low thresholds and was resistant to adding an error correction mechanism, so e.g. “cat” would match my dog and there was nothing I could do about it.
The main thing, however, is the social features. iCloud just works and works well. Google Photos UI was really clunky and notifications weren't reliable so I'd miss comments from relatives.
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.
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".
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy. Even people who are aware that e2e encryption is only enabled on Telegram when you explicitly open a private chat soon abandon it because it lacks multi-device support which makes it easy to miss messages.
WhatsApp has always simplified their security model by not even attempting to support multiple devices (the desktop app communicates via your phone instead of directly with the servers). This greatly simplifies the server infrastructure for WhatsApp too, but there really is no good excuse for them not supporting portable local backup and restore after all these years.
For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.
It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy
Telegram has a feature to import all of your WhatsApp history, but I haven't tried it yet.
> It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy.
Persistent, multi-device conversation history might not seem valuable at first glance, but I can say that it's saved me a lot of trouble numerous times. In theory one could back up important messages from WhatsApp/Signal as they show up, but the problem is that the vast majority of the messages that end up being valuable at some point down the road are precisely those that seemed inconsequential in the moment. By the time you realize you need them they've been long deleted.
I'm not sure if this is a feature I got grandfathered into, but I've got WhatsApp set to back my messages up to Google Drive every week. On my Android phone, the setting is in settings -> chats -> chat backup.
It's something they still push aggressively - on Android. For iOS, I believe they use iCloud, and only iCloud; this means you can switch between Android handsets, or Apple handsets, but not Android to Apple (or vice-versa).
Note that this is based off what I've seen and heard from others, however - I've never actually owned an iPhone to test this.
Indeed, Telegram's appeal comes more from its superior feature set than privacy. It is very convenient to have everything backed up server-side and seamlessly run the same chat app on as many and as various devices as you wish.
>For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.
We tried that and a number of other apps, even a paid one. It apparently only worked with older versions of WhatsApp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I wish this existed as well but with the added element of AI based merging where it can take the best in focus faces (eyes open and smiling) and composite them into a single image. Seems very possible but I haven’t heard of an implementation.
+1. Based on all the other cool search capabilities they have around recognizing your face/people's faces/objects, I'm surprised they don't have a "recognize duplicates" / "recognize bad pics" filter yet...especially when they know you have a bulk or automatic upload into your Photos account from your devices.
Honestly, though, it's still a bad experience browsing other search-based tags and having to wade through all these dupes. I'd rather a clean way of just removing them at the source.
Possibly a compromise could be an auto-collapse function where Photos shows it as a stack with the AI-proposed best pick on top, and an option to fan out and make your own judgment. That doesn't on its own fix the storage side, but it would be a small step from there to a one-click "trash everything from this stack other than the featured item.
Apple kind of does this with live photos, but it would be nice to have GPhotos able to figure it out as well after the fact, since we've all been doing the "take many pics of it just in case" thing since forever.
It definitely is more reasonable for Google, and probably many users too.
But I always liked the idea of never having to worry about storage space and was willing to pay a premium for it.
I doubt that in the end I had more than 100 or 200 Gigabyte stored there, so Google would be a better deal for me even as a fairly heavy user, but I'd be willing to pay that premium for peace of mind.
If Backblaze can offer unlimited backup data for $6, I bet Google could make something similar work for a restricted domain like photos.
I find it a bit odd that an unlimited plan gives you peace of mind. An unlimited plan is never truly unlimited, and unlike a quota'd plan there is always a very real risk that you'll end up having the rug pulled out from under you.
I pay £2.49/month for 200GB which would cover your usage for cheaper. Or you can 2TB for £7.99 which would mean you'd never have to think about storage.
Can we please please get a return of the Assistant-style creations? All that exists now is the Instagram
Stories-style auto-playing albums. Does anyone actually like these better?
Or please allow me to re-upload previously uploaded "high quality" free photos to "original quality" once I pay. After years of being a paid customer I have still not found a way to do this.
You just reminded how the old Android camera app (maybe Samsung?) used to have a "best" mode. Snap some photos, review the best one(s) and only commit to saving your choices.
It was something that could have probably used a UX refresh, but was instead removed entirely in future phones.
I'd love if cloud services implemented something similar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This didn't work for me on Windows for some reason. It would transfer a few photos then the phone would go out to lunch and I'd start getting device errors, application errors, etc.
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?
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.
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.
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_.
Probably because they want this to work for people who only have a mobile device. Agree that it would be nice to have an option to download everything.
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.
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?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadIt 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2015–2019)
And how is this the best solution in 2021?
macos-virtualbox: "Push-button installer of macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra guests in Virtualbox for Windows, Linux, and macOS" https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
macOS-Simple-KVM: "Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM." https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM
If cost is the issue, there are a lot of off-brand hubs. I bought one for $15 of Amazon. So far no issues.
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.
It would be even cooler if my Synology could download all my photos directly from iCloud.
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.
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://registry.hub.docker.com/r/icloudpd/icloudpd/
https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market
Why offer it at all then? At least in Europe the GDPR requires direct transfer of your data to a competitor where technically possible.
Regarding Liechtenstein, it is (along with Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland) part of the European Single Market [1] via trade agreements with the EU, so it's possible that it was trivial to adapt whatever contract they were using in the EU to cover them as well. I don't think it's a coincidence that all 4 are on the list -- but again, this is just a guess.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market
Pretty much all Apple services roll out in phases. From MacWorld Magazine (last year):
> As part of its staggered roll-out, the iPhone 11 launched in a total of 30 countries simultaneously on 20 September 2019. Customers in Israel had to wait another six days; and then the day after that, another 28 countries were added to the list.
When Steve Jobs introduced new products / services, he would have a slide for the first countries in line, then another slide of the next group. Here's an example:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/52/fa/e1/52fae1ce1b1da1e01341...
This isn't Apple ignoring or favoring anyone. It's Apple starting with what they've got so far.
There's nothing but Google Photos to choose from now, but the intent is definitely to support other services.
[1] https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/...
https://datatransferproject.dev/faq
or you could look at the source and see such big tech oligopolists as 'mastodon' and 'rememberthemilk' https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/...
Went to look for ISO standart, and founs out thet it's status is "Withdrawn"
https://www.iso.org/standard/66674.html
"This first edition of ISO/IEC 19944-1, along with ISO/IEC 19944-21 cancels and replaces ISO/IEC 19944:2017, which has been technically revised. The main changes compared to the previous edition are as follows:
— provides additional material which principally deals with organizational data and the need to treat some organizational data in particular ways in order to ensure confidentiality, integrity and so on,
— the new concept of data facets is introduced and data facets are used to extend the expressiveness of data use statements, including adding the concept of which individuals or organizations have control over data,
— the new data use categories are introduced, including some that address the newer uses of data associated with artificial intelligence systems.
A list of all parts in the ISO/IEC 19944 series can be found on the ISO website."
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
The fact that you can download a .zip file with your photos is not enough.
> have their personal data transmitted from one controller to another controller.
(I know of google takeout, which is great but not the same as this)
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.
Photos with correct dates and locations in google photos not longer have any of that data in icloud. Makes icloud photos a lot less usable, not sure if anyone else has had this issue (can't find any articles on it)
Anyways agree that google takeout needs improvement.
So basically a simple migration from Google Photos to iCloud?
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).
Adding a simple toggle to disable it (or even better, a blacklist of tags to never auto-add) would be the best compromise.
Google has always charged for storage in Google Photos - it's part of your "Google Drive" storage quota. They do give you 10GB free though, which can be substantial for a lot of folks.
Although low resolution image uploads doesn't seem very useful for most people. The point of cloud storage is peace of mind to keep your data safe... and to me that implies the original photos not reduced resolution photos.
They are still very high resolution. They're just not the original 50 MB file. It worked perfectly well for the overwhelming majority of people.
Pixel offered unlimited storage even for uncompressed photos, but that option was also discontinued a few years ago.
The main thing, however, is the social features. iCloud just works and works well. Google Photos UI was really clunky and notifications weren't reliable so I'd miss comments from relatives.
You don’t need to even install their app.
CloudHQ used to synchronize content between clouds but they seem to have fewer features these days.
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.
It's a much better deal than Google's cloud storage. That excel kicks the pants off Google sheets is just a bonus.
So yes if if an get it elsewhere for cheaper it's a price premium.
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?
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.
I used it last week to migrate my Google photos to Nextcloud, it was pretty painless.
He said he had lost them earlier as well, when he had migrated to an iPhone from an Android.
This sounds like something a fanboy would say, but honestly it's just a really rather objective comparison of the functionality.
WhatsApp has always simplified their security model by not even attempting to support multiple devices (the desktop app communicates via your phone instead of directly with the servers). This greatly simplifies the server infrastructure for WhatsApp too, but there really is no good excuse for them not supporting portable local backup and restore after all these years.
For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.
Telegram has a feature to import all of your WhatsApp history, but I haven't tried it yet.
Persistent, multi-device conversation history might not seem valuable at first glance, but I can say that it's saved me a lot of trouble numerous times. In theory one could back up important messages from WhatsApp/Signal as they show up, but the problem is that the vast majority of the messages that end up being valuable at some point down the road are precisely those that seemed inconsequential in the moment. By the time you realize you need them they've been long deleted.
Note that this is based off what I've seen and heard from others, however - I've never actually owned an iPhone to test this.
>For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.
We tried that and a number of other apps, even a paid one. It apparently only worked with older versions of WhatsApp.
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/
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.
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.
(There are a lot of "Gemini" bitcoin apps, apparently...)
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.
Like most things from Google, the engineers and PMs on that feature got promoted and the feature eventually went away.
It was called Auto Awesome:
https://picasageeks.com/tag/combining-pictures-to-get-the-be...
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-trigger-the-Auto-Awesome-in-G...
I had some great results from that feature, e.g. from big group shots at a party.
Possibly a compromise could be an auto-collapse function where Photos shows it as a stack with the AI-proposed best pick on top, and an option to fan out and make your own judgment. That doesn't on its own fix the storage side, but it would be a small step from there to a one-click "trash everything from this stack other than the featured item.
Apple kind of does this with live photos, but it would be nice to have GPhotos able to figure it out as well after the fact, since we've all been doing the "take many pics of it just in case" thing since forever.
I could see this being done locally on a device and having a dis-or-dat style interface to quickly choose between competing photos.
But I always liked the idea of never having to worry about storage space and was willing to pay a premium for it.
I doubt that in the end I had more than 100 or 200 Gigabyte stored there, so Google would be a better deal for me even as a fairly heavy user, but I'd be willing to pay that premium for peace of mind.
If Backblaze can offer unlimited backup data for $6, I bet Google could make something similar work for a restricted domain like photos.
I pay £2.49/month for 200GB which would cover your usage for cheaper. Or you can 2TB for £7.99 which would mean you'd never have to think about storage.
Can we please please get a return of the Assistant-style creations? All that exists now is the Instagram Stories-style auto-playing albums. Does anyone actually like these better?
It was something that could have probably used a UX refresh, but was instead removed entirely in future phones.
I'd love if cloud services implemented something similar.
Have I just missed this application?
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.
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.
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.
personal icloud, with all the apple trimmings. It is ok to sell this to you and charge money.