iCloud Photos Downloader (github.com)

Surprisingly, there is no official way to download all (400 Gb) photos from iCloud. Here is an open-source command-line tool to download all your iCloud photos.

Vulnerability hijack incoming with the headline calling for another maintainer

Does anyone know if there’s a way to self host/impersonate iCloud? I’d like to back my iPhone up locally.

I mean can't you go to privacy.apple.com, ask for an archive of your data, and then they'll email you the link to a zip file in a week or two? I'm pretty sure this is what my girlfriend did when she transitioned from an iPhone to a Pixel. I think there's even a specific checkbox for photos/videos

Wow, I will definitely give this a try. I have tens of thousands of photos in iCloud and I literally can’t export them all at once. Photos app chokes and crashes and manually babysitting smaller batches is a pain. It’s pretty clear they want to make it as hard as possible

All my vertical videos in iCloud show up cropped horizontal for some reason. If I go to edit I see the whole video. I really do not want to trust any cloud provider to maintain my years of archives of family photos and videos. Glad things like this exist. I just need properly date-foldered files, without no duplciates. Is that so hard?

There is something similar to Google Takeout for Apple Photos. Recently used it to download thousands of photos.

I’ve been using this for several years now on a little unraid box to download new photos nightly. There’s a few docker containers that wrap in support for notifying when 2FA is required etc. Always makes me nervous, the access it has, but I’d rather have my photos backed up somewhere I own.

This great. I want to switch to android but the only thing stopping me is eight years of photos. No more.

You know you only need to do a GDPR request to Apple (dedicated page), select images and you get a download link after a few hours

I run this periodically from a little shell script; I "should" automate it, but time is scarce.

  ⟩ cat ~/bin/icloud_download
  #!/bin/bash
  mkdir "$(pwd)"/{photos,cookies} 2> /dev/null
  
  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" ]]; then
      echo "need env ICLOUD_USERNAME"
      exit 1
  fi
  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" ]]; then
      echo "need env ICLOUD_PASSWORD"
      exit 1
  fi
  
  podman container run -it --rm --name icloud \
      -v $(pwd)/photos:/data \
      -v $(pwd)/cookies:/cookies \
      -e TZ=America/Boise \
      icloudpd/icloudpd:latest \
      icloudpd --directory /data \
      --cookie-directory /cookies \
      --folder-structure {:%Y/%Y-%m-%d} \
      --username "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" \
      --password "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" \
      --size original

Seems to be looking for a new maintainer. If anyone has the bandwidth, it’s a great piece of software

I'm a big fan of Parachute Backup for this purpose. https://parachuteapps.com/parachute

My concern with backing up iCloud Photos with anything but Apple Photos is that there are some proprietary formats like Live Photos and slow mo video for which exports are lossy. Also, Apple Photos stores all edits non-destructively, so 'flattening' the edits into a single file for export is also a lossy operation.

It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.

Thanks. I cannot get iCloud sync to work at all. It consumes CPU, asks for logins repeatedly, etc but fails to actually do its job. When I think of its bugs and all the issues with the latest iOS (bugs and performance on recent hardware), I am thinking of exiting the Apple ecosystem entirely.

You need an extra tool to download your own photos? That's... not a basic feature?

I'm always surprised what kind of antifeatures people in Apple land are willing to accept and still use those things...

why not use rclone

I created this over the holiday break to do mostly the same:

https://github.com/rcarmo/PhotosExport

...when you try to export files using the (restricted) APIs we get, it automatically triggers a download.

I use this to sync my wife's photos to Immich and it works great, however the auth process is a bit of a pain (not the fault of icloudpd) and have to reauth every few months.

I was just thinking about this today. Apples lack of any 3rd party integration for things like this and iMessage is really annoying sometimes. In addition to a secondary backup, I’d love to automatically sync some photos from a certain album to my parents photo frame. Or if I take a nice nature shot have it sync to a Samsung frame tv. I get the benefits of the walled garden but esp w photos and messaging it seems like opening up a little would allow for some innovation

Parachute Backup is a tool I use: https://parachuteapps.com/parachute

While not free, and not for any other platform than macOS. The program Parachute[1] in the App Store is very nice in downloading both photos from your library as well as files from the various locations.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?...

Became more fascinated with the history of my small hometown (Paris, Texas) TLDR: Much of it was wiped out by a 1916 fire. I spent some time recently vibe-coding this interactive map to provide some kind of historic visualization ( which enabled me to see the impact better ) https://gorch.com/parisfiremap/

I pay around 10 euros a month to apple just so I can sync my photos from iphone to mac and ipad. That’s the only reason I need the 2 TB for icloud service. With an app like this I could download and keep copies and get rid of iCloud subscription?

Is there an iCloud Photos uploader?

I have a script to scan files from my camera and add a compressed copy to a folder. This folder was supposed to work with the iCloud for windows (10) program, but one day it just stopped working.