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'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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
Just give us a ‘download all’ button with the ability to resume in the event of a failure. RSync has been around for a long time why reinvent the wheel for every different service. Welcome to Modern tech - constantly reinventing (square) wheel
This exists if you have a Mac. Set Photos to "Download Originals" in the settings and every photo will be downloaded to the "originals" directory in your photo library bundle.
If you want to get your photos out of iCloud but not using Photos, there’s a neat cross-platform Python CLI tool called icloudpd[0]. It uses iCloud API, supports 2FA, and has a variety of options to control what’s downloaded (e.g., by album).
It helped me free up iCloud storage without filling up my SSD (which is what would’ve happened if I synced the whole library using Photos). I pointed icloudpd to one massive album with random Filmic footage, which I then transferred to external storage. Download took multiple runs due to size and network interruptions, thankfully the tool avoids redownloading already completed items.
GDPR gives you this button. You can do a full data request.
This was introduced for exactly this usecase, to make it possible to switch service providers.
Now only Google needs to be able to read Apple's format.
Well... In the end, you probably do want to back things up in a way that detaches the photos from iCloud sync issues.
The best solution I have found is to use Photos on the Mac to pull down all of your photos and then the osxphotos python project to export them with full metadata and tagging to the directory of your choice which you back up using other means.
I would also like this button, but I would not be surprised if a good chunk of users have an icloud photo library so large that none of their apple devices could fit it in it's (underspeced) storage.
But if I don't pretend your photos live in an ephemeral 'cloud', instead of where they really are - on my server, how can I trick you into letting me hide them behind a worse-than-even-just-using-FTP webpage.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have 400GB in Google Photos, and I am able to use Google Takeout to download them as multiple archives. I try to back them every 1/2 years on a hard drive.
Since I assume you are a Google One user. Maybe contact support and share your issue?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
[1] https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/...
There's nothing but Google Photos to choose from now, but the intent is definitely to support other services.
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").
It would be even cooler if my Synology could download all my photos directly from iCloud.
It’s amazing how out of touch developers on HN are from the average Apple user. Completely, utterly, impossibly out of touch with reality.
Try to imagine proposing a project like this to the internal teams at Apple and being asked “Who is this for!?”
Then Apple themselves and developers in the ecosystem can create nice GUIs for the "typical Apple user."
It helped me free up iCloud storage without filling up my SSD (which is what would’ve happened if I synced the whole library using Photos). I pointed icloudpd to one massive album with random Filmic footage, which I then transferred to external storage. Download took multiple runs due to size and network interruptions, thankfully the tool avoids redownloading already completed items.
[0] https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
Now only Google needs to be able to read Apple's format.
The best solution I have found is to use Photos on the Mac to pull down all of your photos and then the osxphotos python project to export them with full metadata and tagging to the directory of your choice which you back up using other means.
Walled Gardens Must Die.
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.
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.
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.
Telegram has a feature to import all of your WhatsApp history, but I haven't tried it yet.
>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.
Google Takeout fails to export all of my photos..
Since I assume you are a Google One user. Maybe contact support and share your issue?
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.
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.
personal icloud, with all the apple trimmings. It is ok to sell this to you and charge money.