This article is a little weird. The title is actually "Transfer a copy of your iCloud Photos collection to <i>another service</i>" but then the small print says "...to Google Photos."<p>It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet?<p>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.
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
Part of the Data Transfer Project?
<a href="https://datatransferproject.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://datatransferproject.dev/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>There are reverse engineered APIs that folks can use to interact with it, but the official iCloud story has been data lock in.
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).<p>He said he had lost them earlier as well, when he had migrated to an iPhone from an Android.
I have 992GB of photos stored in Google Photos and I desperately want something to transfer all of them FROM Google Photos to any other service.<p>Google Takeout fails to export all of my photos..
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.
If they're a privacy company, they should just offer a dedicated home server for this sort of thing.<p>personal icloud, with all the apple trimmings. It is ok to sell this to you and charge money.
It is a bit sad to see something as simple as "you can now take your photos and put them where you want" become a newsworthy article. This is yet another demonstration that Digital Feudalism is alive and well, and just like its ancestor, we need to get rid of it by empowering people to be their own self
Does rclone[1] interface with iCloud Photos ? It works just fine with google photos[2] ...<p>Without installing rclone and without using any of your own bandwidth, you should be able to:<p><pre><code> ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah gphotos:/blah
</code></pre>
Or maybe you just want to keep a copy in your rsync.net account:<p><pre><code> ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah /your/dir/tree
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://rclone.org" rel="nofollow">https://rclone.org</a><p>[2] <a href="https://rclone.org/googlephotos/" rel="nofollow">https://rclone.org/googlephotos/</a>
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.<p>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?
> Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo.<p>This is actually a dealbreaker. When I edit a photo, I expect the service to store both the original and the edited version, so that I can revert the edit or just look at the original version straight from the camera at any time. I have actually went back and looked at old edited photos I took, and found the edits to be way too heavy handed (too much contrast, too much saturation, etc) than I'd prefer today. One's taste as a photographer grows and changes.
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?
So I could transfer from icloud to google then import into digikam. Interesting<p>Why can't I just download a zip from icloud with my 13,000 photos/videos inside? Where's the API?
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.
Unrelated but does anyone know if the partner sharing photos in Google Photos costs double the storage? I know I can view my partners photos in the app but there is a "save" feature which allows me to save my partners photos to my own "galley". Does that mean the photo counts towards my Google One storage twice? I think it doesn't but I'm not sure.
That's nice, at least everyone can have a secondary backup now. Although this part seems worrying:<p>> Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo.<p>What other caveats are there? I don't think people will like the data loss, I would want to keep the originals too.
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?
Curious to see this evolve.<p>Article seems to hint that it's just Google Photos "for now", but that may change in future.<p>I'd love to have it as a backup mechanism to dump all my photos onto an external hard drive. Doing it now is pretty non-trivial unless you have a mac.
If Apple opened up their APIs so that data could be imported by ANY authorized third party service, that would be fantastic. This post is about a behind-closed-doors deal with Google. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see a reason to celebrate.
For those of you wanting a way to get your photos out of Google, I recommend <a href="https://takeout.google.com" rel="nofollow">https://takeout.google.com</a><p>I used it last week to migrate my Google photos to Nextcloud, it was pretty painless.
Mind you, Google's free plan gives only 15GB space. Purchasing larger space requires unnecessary monthly expense. Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution.
Does anybody have a way do something like this from Google photos to a different host? I really want a second copy of stuff on Google photos, and takeout is completely unusable for me.
Still missing Google Photos as offloading service. Which seems blatantly illegal.<p>p.s. I'd love to use iCloud if it wasn't so slow and buggy (watching old videos on Mac is basically a chore).
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.
I want them to support smb. I would like to be able to sync my photos to a network share. This doesn't mean I wouldn't still buy iCloud space.
Seems to be a move in the right direction to be compliant with GDPR.<p>Article 20 [1] gives me the right to have my personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another controller (where technically feasible).<p>We should be seeing this kind of feature available in all services targeted at European citizens.<p>[1] <a href="https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-20/" rel="nofollow">https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-20/</a>
This is probably the effect of GDPR Article 20: “(..) the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible.“<p><a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/" rel="nofollow">https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/</a>
They don't do any favour. They are supposed to allow it by law because of GDPR. If GDPR was not passed, I personally doubt Apple would do anything. They should allow export not only to Google Photos but also for yourself to download in a way that you could import it to any other photo storage service.
I really really hate how locked I am on the products I own...<p>I pay for Apple music yet I can't play it on my Google home.<p>I use Google maps yet in some apps it forces me to use Apple maps (even though I don't have it installed).<p>I use Google photos, which I can't use to manage my photos in the native way that Apple photos do it.<p>Airdrop only works between Apple devices.<p>I use Chrome and yet some apps will just open links in Safari (iOS).
If any Google Photos product people are here...<p>Since you're ending free unlimited photo storage, I <i>badly</i> 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.
Why would I transfer my photos <i>into</i> 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 <i>to</i> a service run by an advertising company.
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.