Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos | Hacker News Reader

Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

support.apple.com

558 pointsbrunoluiz348 comments

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").

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.

> However, Apple never called it Pro.

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.

No, this was just a plain consumer-level MacBook, sold alongside both the Pro and the Air line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2015–2019)

A laptop can be customized with accessories, same as a desktop can.

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.

But if your library is mostly on the cloud it gets worse.

And how is this the best solution in 2021?

I did the SMB share (over WiFi, to a NAS) you mentioned and backed up my library without too much trouble. This was about 120GB.

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:

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

> I'm not interested in buying a hub for a one-off operation.

If cost is the issue, there are a lot of off-brand hubs. I bought one for $15 of Amazon. So far no issues.

One of PC Magazine Editor's Choice name brand hubs with support for power delivery retails at $30.

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.

I wonder if you can do this using an AWS instance of a mac. And then move the photos to S3.

> I wonder if you can do this using an AWS instance of a mac. And then move the photos to S3.

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.

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.

That would be sweet.

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.

[0]https://www.arqbackup.com

I run this docker container on my Synology to have it download a backup of my iCloud Photo Library

https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/icloudpd/icloudpd/

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

You can do this with the Windows iCloud app. Just downloaded 7000 photos through it.

It'll be countries where Apple is facing anti-trust complaints.

Yeah, just a small fraction of countries, like the United States and the European Union. I'm sure nobody cares about those places.

Yes, only a billion people in the wealthiest countries in the world who are most likely to own an Apple device.

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.

> Liechtenstein is a part of the EU

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.

There is a single trade framework that contains them all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market

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.

Easy migration to a competitor could hurt their customer retention.

Why offer it at all then? At least in Europe the GDPR requires direct transfer of your data to a competitor where technically possible.

The GDPR (or some similar requirement) only appears to apply to a subset of the chosen countries.

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.

It also apply to every data owned by a citizen living in EU (EU != Europe), regardless of the country the company is located.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market

GDPR covers the whole EEA (and UK), so the data portability right also applies in Liechtenstein.

> 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:

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.

That is, in fact, a small fraction of the world population.

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.

Yet every code implementation exists in some country bound by laws.

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?

The actual transfer page also says "Choose where you’d like to transfer your photos:" and has a dropdown titled "Select destination"

There's nothing but Google Photos to choose from now, but the intent is definitely to support other services.

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.

[1] https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/...

Once your library gets large, local storage is just too hard and expensive on a laptop. Photos.app seems to hate using external or network drives.

I've been using it on an external drive for ages. What kinds of issues have you run into?

I would really like to know if the M1 chip helps this in any regard.

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.

I am pretty sure this project is purpose built to keep your data amongst the big tech oligopoly. You exercising your freedom is no good for anyone.

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."

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/...

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"

https://www.iso.org/standard/66674.html

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."

in the meantime, https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... has been pretty reliable for me.

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.

What do you mean? Have you read this?

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.

Most notably this section about consumer having the right to

> have their personal data transmitted from one controller to another controller.

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.

For those curious - https://datatransferproject.dev

Ah, easing of travel restrictions often accompanies a diplomatic thaw.

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.

They are offering it regions where it’s not required by law as well.

Sounds like a trust to keep minor providers out of the market.

AKA the Anti Anti-Trust Project

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

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.

Walled Gardens Must Die.

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.

Pretty sure even if Google doesn't support it explicitly, you'll have open source tools that can download + re-upload to Google.

That assumes Google provides API and authorizes the access, or else you're stuck scraping complex web apps with a Chrome extension.

Custom 3rd party software is usually banned from a consumer cloud API for security reasons.

I'd say it's pretty common with cloud providers actually. Bring in data? (Spotify playlists, Photos, Contacts etc. etc.) come on in, we have great APIs. Want to take your data out? File a GDPR request and get it in some opaque format.

No incentive for Google to explicitly refuse photos from Apple for example.

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.

Just upgrade the SSD

What an ignorant thing to say. You pretend like external hard drives don't exist.

No, i didn‘t. I just pointed out that a full download und upload of a ~500 GB library is not a feasable task for many average users. I‘m also not sure you can even download straight to external storage with iOS safari.

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.

[0] https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

Rsync, the command line even, is familiar to vanishingly small slice of the Apple user base.

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!?”

They don't have to make everyone type in `rsync -aBc foo bar` they just need to expose it in a way that rsync can work with it.

Then Apple themselves and developers in the ecosystem can create nice GUIs for the "typical Apple user."

Then why do we care what runs behind the GUI? that's Apple's business.

Can you imagine being the responsible engineer developing this capability and having the burden of a 2 trillion dollar company's reputation if something happens and photos of millions of people are leaked!?

This is what I mean by how people are out of touch with reality.

Any fuckups would destroy Apple forever. They're not going to listen to some armchair rsync bandit.

I agree that lots of HN is out of touch but rsync is a very robust and widely used tool.

Furthermore, i don’t see the privacy implications as it’s a client side tool so while it could fuck up downloading I don’t see how it could leak photos. If it were to break, it would just be another piece of buggy apple software of which there are many.

Jumping on to discussion here, I'm an HN user and I know somewhat tech. Maybe not as good as a FAANG engineer here, but still I can call myself above average when it comes to other regular Apple users.

Even I haven't used rsync in my life, and I can guarantee that regular users don't even know what rsync even means.

They only need a place to backup their photos, and a way to easily transfer them between services, which apple provides.

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.

They would loose control if they allowed you to use modern tools that work well

Part of the Data Transfer Project? https://datatransferproject.dev/

Also, wasn't this mandatory in EU? Something related to GDPR?

Yes, data portability is a requirement in the GDPR. You should not be locked in to a service just because they have your data.

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.

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

Are you sure you meant to include that "/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.

You can set this up with IFTTT.

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.

I also lost all my WhatsApp history and data when I added WhatsApp to a new phone. Weird that it can only be active on one device.

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.

Maybe it is. It’s encrypted though so could be hard to check.

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.

And the backups are not inter-operable. A backup taken on Android cannot be transferred and restored on an iPhone, and vice versa.

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.

I used Wazzapmigrator to do this a couple of years ago

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.

Google Takeout fails to export all of my photos..

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?

Does it actually miss data that should be there or does the Takeout fail?

Did you try rclone ?

Rclone can't download original quality files from google photos(API limitation)

Thanks, I had no idea.

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.

I'm just amazed these services have face tagging for dogs, and that you consider it so obvious that you feel like complaining about it.

If it's broken, then it's broken. It doesn't matter how futuristic and awesome it is.

Yep, in this case it sounds like “awesome futuristic idea poorly implemented” is worse than not having the feature.

Adding a simple toggle to disable it (or even better, a blacklist of tags to never auto-add) would be the best compromise.

I uploaded a 4D obstetric ultrasound to get rid of the CD. Photos.app tagged it as my child. That blew my mind.

You can manually go and say "this is my new dog" to improve the tagging.

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.

They can train your dog?!

Not concerned with handing all that data to Google?

You trust Google?!

> 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.

There was a free tier of photos and videos under a certain resolution which didn't count towards your storage which they're removing.

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.

> Although low resolution image uploads doesn't seem very useful

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.

It's compressed not reduced resolution for most practical cases.

Those "free" photos and videos were still recompressed.

They have also always had unlimited uploads for free at lower quality.

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.

How about privacy?

I haven't seen any of my photos given out to anyone, so what's your concern? The ToS also doesn't say anything about sharing my private photos.

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.

Maybe that's all worth $20/yr for photo and file storage?

If they're a privacy company, they should just offer a dedicated home server for this sort of thing.

personal icloud, with all the apple trimmings. It is ok to sell this to you and charge money.

Then we are only missing google providing the same service!

(I know of google takeout, which is great but not the same as this)

Yup. For those of us with slow WiFi, Google Takeout is basically unusable.

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.

They will usually attach metadata in JSON files accompanying the downloads if it's not attached to the photos, in my experience.

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

force protocols to be open would just about do it. People would trivially write cross-service applications on top and we could have an internet where people can freely move data around. Apple and Google would be delegated to the backend and users could choose the clients they want. It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. We're stuck in the 19th century railroad industry.

> It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous.

At what point do you become compelled to start transforming your web application into an open protocol?

Maybe at the unicorn mark.

Certainly any company that relies on “safe harbor” style protections or sells online services (alone or bundled with software) as a subscription should be required to fully open and document the protocol.

But most SaaS companies don’t make protocols, they make web applications. So I’m not really sure what’s implied by these trivial-to-implement protocols. Having a functional and well documented API isn’t a protocol. An open protocol would be more like a situation where any vendor could implement an “iCloud service”, and any “iCloud client” could connect to any vendors service.

I don’t agree here. A web application API, properly documented and exposed to any client a participant wants to use becomes a protocol for that service, there’s no difference between CalDAV and the Google Calendar web app’s API except that one is documented, rarely changes, and if offer by a service provider would generally allow any client that implements it to connect, and the other is undocumented and it’s probably against the terms of service to build your own clients. The goal should be to force every API for these providers to meet some minimal definition of a protocol, not to define government mandated standard protocols or force interoperability between services.

Your definition removes all distinction between the concept of a protocol, and the concept of an API. Google Calendar doesn't implement the Google Calendar Protocol, there is no standards body involved in determining how Google Calendar works, you're not free to go an implement your own Google Calendar compatible service, and Google can change Google Calendar without consultation with anybody. There is no definition of protocol where a single-service API, designed, implemented and published by a single party is a protocol. Google Calendar implements an API.

If your argument is that companies should be compelled to publish good API documentation, and allow any client to connect to them, then aside from creating a completely unnecessary system of regulatory moats, and aside from using the wrong words to describe this idea, you're likely to run directly into a 1A violation.

I think smaller companies tend to have the most open protocols (to the point that it almost becomes a security risk) because they don't have resources to work on unnecessary obfuscation. The protocols might not be documented anywhere but if a website is able to access a backend endpoint then someone else will be able to access that endpoint too.

Nothing in the parent comment says anything about requiring good documentation or 100% backwards compatibility.

You seem to be talking about APIs rather than protocols.

There is a lot of secret sauce in protocols. Those decisions can have serious positive/negative implications on performance and features. Making those easily available to everyone could potentially destroy a business.

Don't get me wrong, I've had to reverse engineer my share of proprietary protocols to get behavior I wanted (and would have loved to see them be open), but I don't think I can get onboard with the idea that requiring open protocols is trivial or noninvasive.

The secret sauce in Apple/Google photos is not the API for accessing the data.

But we aren't discussing just these specific APIs/protocols (and I haven't look at them, so I'd have to take your word on that), we are discussing this generally.

>It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous

You can't honestly believe this. Even if one agrees with making some things open protocols, potentialy by law (messenger, social networks), stating "it's trivial" to do such a thing is just the height of hyperbole.

I’m afraid some people really do seem to believe this. Hard to understand, I know. Fixed, regulator defined protocols everyone would be forced to use. Sheesh.

So, someone (who?) comes out with a standard, and then everyone just freezes capabilities then? Nothing evolves? Or if it does, it does so very unequally? Already in this announcement is the non-transfer of Live Photos because presumably Google doesn't support it. Apparently they also have a 20k per album cap, which at that point you get different behavior than you're expecting. These are just a few examples of where things go wrong.

If we're going to legislate anything, I believe the right way is to force complete data export is made available via a reasonable API/process, which then allows people to independently evolve & progress, and competitors will then need to support (or not) what comes out on the other side. But customers then know they can always extract or simply backup their data themselves if needed.

An interface doesn't necessarily limit what the implementation can do. An implementation can well be a super set of the interface (some open standard it supports), with additional features that's not in the interface.

>and then everyone just freezes capabilities then? Nothing evolves? Or if it does, it does so very unequally?

every client provider can do whatever they want, that'd be the beauty of it. Someone could write a stripped down, privacy respecting Facebook client and charge users five bucks instead of running ads, if that's what users want. Someone could offer a chronological news-feed free of algorithmic meddling, or one that you can fine-tune however you like. That'd would simply be developer and user choice. Just think of RSS-readers or podcast apps or email clients. They're not all equal, but that's a feature, not something gone wrong.

What does the Facebook get out of it?

absolutely nothing, it would subject their applications to genuine competition (they could of course still offer their own client) and destroy their walled garden, which is the entire point. The purpose such regulation is to benefit consumers, developers, and the health of the market overall. not Facebook. I assume they would be kicking and screaming.

> it would subject their applications to genuine competition (they could of course still offer their own client) and destroy their walled garden, which is the entire point.

Hmm. At least in the case that the OP was taking about -- third-party Facebook clients -- I don't think it would "destroy their walled garden" any more than third-party Twitter clients did back when those were meaningfully a thing. Standardized APIs aimed at enabling full-featured third-party social network clients wouldn't really contribute to a robust market in competing social networks; they'd just contribute to a robust market in, well, third-party social network clients.

What it seems to me you want is a couple steps beyond data portability, which honestly really isn't enough on its own. What I actually need is a way to import the user's social graph from Facebook or Twitter. That's arguably how Instagram bootstrapped its success initially: if you gave it your Twitter account, it would download all your followers/following info. (And, of course, that's why Twitter shut down that API after that.)

"But doesn't that violate GDPR?" someone is raising their hand to say, and: yes. GDPR as written does help protect privacy, but it's also an incredible boon to social network incumbents: it under it, your social graph can't be treated as your data, because by definition it contains personally identifiable information about all your contacts. For your regulation idea to be meaningful, GDPR and similar privacy regulation around the world would have to be overhauled -- if all the "open API" can do is import/export my personal data sans social graph, it becomes little more than a backup mechanism and a convenient way to fill out registration forms.

> every client provider can do whatever they want

I feel like you're missing his point a bit, which is that sure they can do whatever they want, but it would be within a well-defined and highly regulated system, and would need to conform to an interface that would be difficult to change and evolve.

A bit like how IRC never really got updated with features people like to see in newer IM apps, like conversation history, read receipts, sending images and videos, threading, and so on. Or HTTP. Or email. Federation always leads to ossification.

But I already have and use an rss reader

I think you missed an important link here: opening the API is not the same as making a good standard. The latter tends to take years. The former... Well, Google internal APIs often have minor changes every couple weeks. And the standard of documentation is more or less "go read the code". Opening those would not be useful. I don't know if Facebook is any better. But their motto is "move fast and break things", so I'm skeptical.

don't forget that there will be competition on the protocols as well, I'm not just arguing for protocols as a means for more innovation on the client side, but also more competition on the backend itself. If data becomes portable, which is one side effect of protocols, competition on standards itself intensifies. So if Google and Facebook are bad stewards of their APIs, there is room for competition to emerge. Google does stuff that sucks on their end? Use existing APIs to migrate over to dropbox or whatever, tell your users. In an open market there is an incentive for good standards.

I, uh, can't grok competing protocols as a good thing.

HTML had been a standard for about 25 years and it doesn't seem to be stagnant.

> Already in this announcement is the non-transfer of Live Photos because presumably Google doesn't support it.

Google Photos definitely supports Live Photos, I've successfully uploaded and shared lots of Live Photos via the Google Photos for iOS app.

Which then raises the question of why doesn't the tool support it?

Assuming that they're using the Google Photos API for this, maybe the upload media API calls [1] don't trigger whatever handling is needed for Live Photos? The Google Photos app might be doing something undocumented/unavailable-in-the-public-API that triggers the Live Photo behavior, since a Live Photo is two associated pieces of media.

Or Apple might just not be uploading the videos that accompany the photo for some reason.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/upload-m...

Just spitballing here: when I copy photos from my iPhone via usb to pc there are two files: the image and a .mov for a Live Photo. My guess is the metadata is lost when exporting to google photos, like usb, so you lose the “Live Photo”.

Forcing the protocol to be open and documented and free for any user that can use the official site/client to connect to doesn’t have to mean forcing a standard. You might want to require o rubies compatibility with old versions and deal with obfuscation or unnecessary changes as anti competitive behaviour, but otherwise just ensuring that anyone can create and sell or give away clients, interoperability and import/export tools, etc. would be an excellent step in the right direction. With no obvious downsides.

>So, someone (who?) comes out with a standard, and then everyone just freezes capabilities then? Nothing evolves?

Hopefully yes. Most "progress" is towards worse services and more user data minining and ads.

But if needed, they can always innovate. But they'd still have to be able to export to the standard format (even if it can hold less than their full features).

http was open once and technically it is open now. Soon the complexity of the protocol will allow only the major corporations to implement it (and it is unclear whether that complexity helps most people).

It kind of baffles me that people really want so much regulation. We already have more than enough of it.

Yeah, it's the "lets you" part that ticks me off. That's the reason I have both Google Photos upload and Dropbox Upload enabled. Don't want to wake up one time to find out my photos are gone because some algo had a bad day.

You've always been "allowed" to move your photos from Apple Photos to Google Photos. The difference here is that Apple is doing it for you.

Oh. Well, my dislike for the big tech lock-in solutions is more general in nature. Thanks for clearing it up.

Curious, what happens if Apple locks your account (not in their ecosystem but M1 got me apple-curious ;)? Can you still export you're data, photos?

What do you mean by "locks your account"? If you're using Photos on a Mac then everything is stored locally. If you're using iCloud, you still have the option to download all the originals locally. The only people that would really make use of this are those that don't know how to open the Photos library to access the photos directly.

Probably not from their online service, but unless you switch on “optimise local storage”, all of the files are already on your local disk in JPEG or HEIC.

I make a lot of photos and videos, those take up a lot of space. 128GB to store everything locally won't cut it. That's why I have a backup in form of Dropbox.

Additionaly, I plan to amend that with a self-hosted solution. I know, this reeks of tin foil, sure. However, whenever I read a horror story of someone getting locked out of their accounts and loosing access to their data a chill runs down my spine. Everytime I see captach start popping up too often I wonder if I'm suddenly, for some reason getting close to getting banned. This is the same reason why I have a GSuite account under my domain and never use login with Blabla solutions.

But you could always do this. Apple seems to go a step further and does this on your behalf. I think that’s newsworthy.

I still can't insert a USB drive into an iPad without hassle.

You can on an iPad Pro?

And on other iPads with an adapter too:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-external-devi...

And I can’t still plug my vga monitor into my iPhone.

Actually you can - there is an adapter [1] for that.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD825AM/A/lightning-to-vg...

What a time to be alive!

you can, for $699, per month

From literally any browser you can get a zip of all your iCloud photos and your iPhone/iPad will present itself as a mass storage device on any PC.

I still can’t download a car.

If anyone's trying to make that a reality, I just want to say I'd much rather download pizza.

My friend showed me a sandisk doodad he bought off eBay the other day that had an iPad plug coming off it. I was impressed. So strike that one off.

You can with a lightning USB drive or a lightning to USB adapter, but it'll only transfer at USB 2.0 speeds on most iPhones, iPads, and iPad Pros with Lightning. Some will apparently do USB3 speeds but you need the right adapter. And if you plug it into your iDevice into your computer with a lighting to USBC or A adapter, it's still just USB 2 speeds. At least as of the last time I looking into it. Apple always made it hard to figure this out. The newer USB-C ones you can transfer faster.

Why do you use an IPAD if you want freedom?

They were required to do this by law in the EU.

Could you please elaborate on that? Which particular law are they abiding?

It is covered by right to data portability included in GDPR passed in 2018.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Doesn’t that say that Apple has to give you access to your photos in a format where you could then upload the photos/videos to Google? It doesn’t say that Apple has to perform the transfer for you. That’s the novelty here — Apple handling the transfer on their side without any user intervention.

Given the country list, this is being done to likely get ahead of some kind of regulation, but I don’t think this is necessarily due to this specific clause. This is above and beyond what would be minimally required.

But from other comments, it looks like this is the start of other data transfer initiatives between major tech companies. Which would be a good thing, even if it is a result of trying to avoid further regulation.

It wouldn't be under that specific clause, but GDPR gets attached to many situations because people don't have a clear understanding of what it is and the limitations. If you work for a global company you'll find GDPR attached all kinds of customer requests to get extra traction.

And is Google required to do something similar to help users transfer their photos to a competing service?

Every service available in the EU and the UK has to do it.

This is incorrect. The photos in Apple Photos and iCloud were already portable. Apple is now offering to do this for you which is the only notable thing about this. Nowhere in the GDPR does it say that a company has to move your data for you if requested. They just have to allow you to move it if you choose to do so and that was already the case.

It is newsworthy considering that they did this without being forced to do so. Things like telephone number porting weren’t possible until the Federal government forced the issue

Take Gmail as an example. They provided nice way of allowing applications to access your mailbox. Then we got data mining apps which started using this for malicious purposes (with user consent). Now the API is only available for developers willing to go through security audit ($15k-75k).

10 years ago Facebook provided a pretty nice set of APIs and way to grant access to your data (for example photos, messages, friend lists) for 3rd party apps. What we got was 1000 quiz apps using these for data mining - with user consent.

Android is another example. Initially Google put little restrictions for data applications could access - with permission from user. We all know what happened.

I’m not saying we should stop trying to tear down the walled gardens, but this is not trivial problem to solve. Some users might be even better off with their data locked in the garden managed by Apple, Google or Facebook.

Although I do consider "digital feudalism" a legitimate risk, I don't think this is a good example. An increasing number of people don't have laptops but instead just phones and game consoles, so so have no access to normal data-centric affordances.

There is a real risk but it's not that different from the pre cloud era: that of proprietary formats. Google Docs itself is proprietary (if you map the Google Drive files to your local filesystem in the style of Dropbox the actual local data store locally is just a URI). It's worse, but not a huge amount worse than having your files be a proprietary blob, say a Word file.

And there are of course innumerable services that have data that never leaves the cloud from Facebook at one extreme to various services such as Gantt charts that aren't downloadable in any meaningful way.

But as I said I don't think this one case is a good example: In the case of Apple's stuff, I can keep it all current on my laptop: just tell photos, iCloud files, music etc to keep a complete copy on the local disk (i.e. don't treat it as a chache) and then back up normally. Music, photos, etc are stored in normal files (JPEG and mp3). My IMAP client downloads everything (messages and attachments) so if I were willing to use iCloud mail or gmail everything would be backed up; ditto for my calendars and address book. This is the same for many other cloud providers like Dropbox.

My criminal mind says this could be a way for Apple (and Later Google) to benefit more, from the difference in the price of their phones - Thanks to pricing based on Storage. Once they allow these photo storages to duplicate your data, you will need double the storage and phone starting line-up would be 256GB and upwards very soon. I think innovation to make money has saturated, and now it would be quirks like this to make more money per phone.

While it is sad that it is news worthy, it goes against Steve Jobs' ideology...

There are options in the middle - e.g. in M365 Personal, camera uploads are deposited as plain old files in your OneDrive Pictures folder and the Win10 photos app is driven directly by that. I periodically take offline backups by copying my OneDrive to an external drive and sleep easy that I have all my stuff.

I switched from OneDrive to pCloud for that reason, because this isn't a special feature... it's just how filesystems work.

My account isn't much more than a networked drive, so this idea of adding 'transfer to another cloud' or whatever is still a regression.

While we're here, read the title: "Apple now lets you..."

Lets? Oh, thanks for giving permission, Apple. I don't think any of this would fly under the GDPR's data portability provisions.

You could always download your entire iCloud Photos library and reupload it anywhere else you wanted, it’s just tedious. The noteworthy thing is Apple will transfer your photos to Google Photos entirely on your behalf, without you having to download a single photo.

My photos are on my drive in a bunch of messy folders and I can transfer them wherever I want. Get your filthy clouds off my lawn.

I so want to go back to this but after losing two of my 2 TB drives got corrupted in the past 15 years and now I'm scared of leaving everything on a drive. Perhaps a cheap S3 deep archive storage + a physical drive as main storage is the answer but then I won't have an app like Google Photos which is actually pretty great especially for sharing with family.

Does rclone[1] interface with iCloud Photos ? It works just fine with google photos[2] ...

Without installing rclone and without using any of your own bandwidth, you should be able to:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah gphotos:/blah

Or maybe you just want to keep a copy in your rsync.net account:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah /your/dir/tree

[1] https://rclone.org

[2] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

iCloud photos aren’t just jpegs in a directory

Take a look at the rclone targets list:

https://rclone.org/

In fact, most of them are not files in a directory - that's what makes most of the rclone use-cases so impressive. If they can interact with gdrive/photos/S3/etc. they should be able to interact with iCloud Photos ...

Frustratingly, support for Google Photos in rclone is handicapped by the limitations of the Google Photos API: you can't download Photos at original resolution. This is documented on your second link.

That's unfortunate ... and I believe there are some other end-user ("consumer") products that also interfere with the direct mechanism that 'rclone' uses to request data.

> It works just fine with google photos

Second line in your link:

> NB The Google Photos API which rclone uses has quite a few limitations, so please read the limitations[0] section carefully to make sure it is suitable for your use.

For anyone intending to use rclone to download their photos from Google Photos, be aware that you will lose EXIF data. If you download videos, they will be lower quality. There are more limitations in the link.

[0] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

If they have a Mac, then yes. You can enable download of all full-resolution photos from iCloud to a Photos library which can be stored anywhere and is stored in a standard directory structure.

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 Google Photos iOS app just uploads all photos that my iPhone takes automatically, regardless of album. Yours doesn't?

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.

Would love to see this come to Apple Notes, it'd be great to be able to export just for backup purposes

There’s this nice app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12

Is there similar functionality for the other way around?

So basically a simple migration from Google Photos to iCloud?

This should be what you're looking for: https://takeout.google.com

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.

But what about the privacy, the PRIVACY! /s

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.

I would love that as I have to move my family from Google to iCloud.

> Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo.

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

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.

Pretty sure it only counts if you save them to your own library. Also, if you don't save them before turning off partner sharing, they'll disappear.

Truth is I don't want anything to be uploaded to Google, Apple or any other cloud. I want everything to go straight to my own server!

If iOS supported Time Machine backups, my NAS backup solution would be complete. It's crazy that we're either locked into iCloud or have to sync with iTunes.

Yes, I know about iTunes Wifi backup, but I'd rather not be on my home network for this.

That's nice, at least everyone can have a secondary backup now. Although this part seems worrying:

> Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo.

What other caveats are there? I don't think people will like the data loss, I would want to keep the originals too.

It’s good that apple offers this but when you try to move your photos away from google photos It’s hard like hell

Isn't Google Takeout pretty easy?

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

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.

For me that would be a 600+ gig download. I wish I could do it, but it’s a little unwieldy.

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_.

> Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload?

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.

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.

Curious to see this evolve.

Article seems to hint that it's just Google Photos "for now", but that may change in future.

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.

They have to do it by law (GDPR) if they want to sell their products in the EU. People should start making complaints that they cannot port their data to other services, then they should implement that in no time.

> People should start making complaints

Do you know how to go about this? Thanks!

Is this to avoid some sort of monopoly accusation or the result of new data protection rules?

It's part of https://datatransferproject.dev/

For those of you wanting a way to get your photos out of Google, I recommend https://takeout.google.com

I used it last week to migrate my Google photos to Nextcloud, it was pretty painless.

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 :(

Nextcloud now has an app to migrate your Google data (files, photos, calendars and contacts) straight away.

I used https://www.raidrive.com/ which lets you mount Google Photos as a (read-only) drive in Windows.

This is great I wish they’d give an option to just download all your photos as a zip file.

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.

Yes, because iCloud and Google Photos shouldn't be considered the only piece to a backup solution.

Google's storage plans start at $19.99/year for 100GB. For less than a cup of coffee every month I'm able to back up my photos wherever I am, search across photos, share them easily with iOS and Android users, easily buy larger prints and photo books.

Yes, there's the fact that Google scans photos. I personally find it really useful to search for an object or face in Google Photos that other services just don't do as well.

>Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution

Well of course that's true. Nothing will beat owning a physical copy of your files in terms of backups/reliability in the worst cases. But you can always do both. Upload to the cloud and perform periodic account takeouts of your photos and store them to disk.

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.s. I'd love to use iCloud if it wasn't so slow and buggy (watching old videos on Mac is basically a chore).

Wow that’s awesome, now I wish they’d add Amazon Photos as well.

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.

Have I just missed this application?

Oh there’s an application alright. Getting it to actually do its job is another matter entirely.

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.

Is this all automatic (excluding the SD card bit)?

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.

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.

When is google going to offer to transfer my photos to iCloud? I've done it using their export.. it was a nightmare. Dates aren't preserved.

Funny reading this while Apple re-uploads my entire 10+ year photo library _from an external drive_ back to iCloud after I fresh-installed Big Sur.

Protip: go the other direction. I've found that re-downloading the whole thing into a new library is >10x faster than resyncing your local 'originals' with iCloud. I have no idea why this is, but I've done the 'download' method twice, and it has been so much faster and more reliable (and less stressful).

More ways to do this is nice but you could always download and upload. This isn't some amazing new thing that was keeping you from doing that.

Increasing the UX of a product never seems to be a mistake. And of course switching to another device is also part of the User Experience.

i wanted to do the exact opposite, moving photos from Google to apple icloud but google takeout exports are a complete mess

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.

[1] https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-20/

That's the last fucking place I want my photos.

When you run out of space, you're screwed.

Now we just need to be able to transfer iCloud backup of Whatsapp to Google Drive

How about letting us just download a targz of them? Why is this so hard?

What, so Google can just go ahead and delete them?

please reserve such comments to reddit

Aaaw, thanks Apple. You're a mensch.

-_-

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.“

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

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.

How are they obligated by GDPR to support server side data transfer to Google in particular? My understanding is that they are only required to make it possible for you to download your data so that you can upload it elsewhere if you'd like to.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

The right to data portability allows individuals to obtain and reuse their personal data for their own purposes across different services.

It allows them to move, copy or transfer personal data easily from one IT environment to another in a safe and secure way, without affecting its usability.

It doesn't say that they have to implement moving from one provider to another without you having to download the data, but I think the key phrase is "easily from one IT environment to another in a safe and secure way, without affecting its usability".

I really really hate how locked I am on the products I own...

I pay for Apple music yet I can't play it on my Google home.

I use Google maps yet in some apps it forces me to use Apple maps (even though I don't have it installed).

I use Google photos, which I can't use to manage my photos in the native way that Apple photos do it.

Airdrop only works between Apple devices.

I use Chrome and yet some apps will just open links in Safari (iOS).

At least being able to move your photos out of Apple Photos is a step towards not locking you into Apple's ecosystem. I don't think the ultimate goal is removing lock in completely. It's a fools errand to try and defeat it. The goal should be to free you from being locked into a company that takes it too far. This creates free choice and a market opportunity for another business to serve people like you.

Also .. I thought Apple Music was added to Google Home? I thought Apple now allows you to choose Google Maps as default mapping app?

So far, Apple only allows changing the default web browser or email app.

If any Google Photos product people are here...

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 don't know whether you're on iOS, but if you are, the app on the app store called "Gemini" has been a game-changer for me in this regard.

Is this the one? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/...

(There are a lot of "Gemini" bitcoin apps, apparently...)

Gemini is a great app. I wish apple photos or google photos had similar features. Even Lightroom needs it since 1/5 of my photos are out of focus.

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.

Pixel motion photos Top Shot uses AI to do this.

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.

Google Photos used to have this! It had a auto magic filter that combined multiple shots into a magic shot with no blinks and all smiles.

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.

+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.

I'd second that, or alternatively just a plan that lets me upload unlimited photos for a monthly fee like Flickr used to do very early on.

Google will give you 2 TB a year for $99, gives me some confidence that it won't go away as easy.

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.

> Possibly a compromise could be an auto-collapse function where Photos shows it as a stack with the AI-proposed best pick on top

I could see this being done locally on a device and having a dis-or-dat style interface to quickly choose between competing photos.

This exists. It uses you general google storage quota (shared with gmail, gdrive, etc).

This is different, though: Flickr used to charge for the capability to upload, Google charges for keeping the photos available.

Ah I see. To be honest I feel like paying for storage capacity is a much more reasonable pricing model.

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.

...and if any are here let me add:

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.

How are they going to recover the bits that were lost? It was free because the images were smaller.

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.

How about just letting me be able to plug my phone into any laptop and drag and drop my pictures?

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.

Import is different than drag and drop. The image folder doesn’t show on windows, linux, or even my Mac.

Doesn't the Google Photo app do this already without waiting? Is there a use-case for this?

If I understand correctly, this directly transfers data from Apple’s server to theirs.

You don’t need to even install their app.

Seems like a one-time export, unless I'm wrong.

CloudHQ used to synchronize content between clouds but they seem to have fewer features these days.

next thing, they will let you hold the copyright for your own pictures...

>Lets You Ye, no. I still spit on them.

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.

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.

"Premium" being 2.5$ a month for 200GB of storage space?

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...

Disagree. As Steve job puts it: dropbox (and cloud storage in general) is "a feature and not a product".

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.

It's not photo storage it's general cloud storage. And it's not a spreadsheet app it's the an office suite.

It's a much better deal than Google's cloud storage. That excel kicks the pants off Google sheets is just a bonus.

Microsoft charges less per user for 1tb and msoffice 365 if you can find 5 family members to share the family plan with.

So yes if if an get it elsewhere for cheaper it's a price premium.

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