Considering the fourth word of the second paragraph is "initially," I think you're correct — this is a work in progress.
I hope that Apple will eventually allow bulk downloads of iCloud photos to the desktop. Right now you can only do 1,000 at a time, and it took me almost a week to make a local backup of my wife's iCloud photos.
When downloading directly from iCloud.com that's true (and annoying), but you can also bulk download all of the originals via Photos.app (making sure to check "Download Originals to this Mac" rather than "Optimize Mac Storage").
Unfortunately, that wouldn't work for my wife's situation. Her computer is one of those MacBooks with a 256GB drive, and only one USB-C port. So the amount of data stored in her iCloud photos would easily overload her drive, and if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed.
I'm not interested in buying a hub for a one-off operation.
I tried afp:// and smb:// mounting Photos libraries on large drives on other machines on the LAN, then downloading the photos to those, but that turned out to be excruciatingly slow, and very unreliable.
> only one USB-C port [...] if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed.
Absolutely crazy how we ended up accepting supposedly professional devices that work like this. Choose between having power or being able to use a external hard drive (unless you purchase accessories of course). Mean while, desktop computers are built to be customizable in every single way.
I think in the marketing material, Apple tends to call everything they do "for professionals", not just the line of hardware with "Pro" in its name.
And how is this the best solution in 2021?
macos-virtualbox: "Push-button installer of macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra guests in Virtualbox for Windows, Linux, and macOS" https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
macOS-Simple-KVM: "Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM." https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM
If cost is the issue, there are a lot of off-brand hubs. I bought one for $15 of Amazon. So far no issues.
As I understand it, AWS virtualization is a full Mac client, right? If that's the case, there's no technical limitation that would prevent this.
It would be even cooler if my Synology could download all my photos directly from iCloud.
I'll mention that with the Synology app, you can have your photos be automatically copied to your Synology. I've been doing that since I got an iPhone, so I don't have the need to download from iCloud. Actually, I don't sync my photos to iCloud since I have my local copy.
Do you have an offsite backup solution for your Synology? I do for all my most important data via Backblaze. I also used to use Arq[0] for Mac, but the UI wasn't very helpful when attempting a restore. This was probably 5y ago. I've been meaning to download and review the latest version.
I still find iCloud backups useful because hey, you can't have too many backups of your photos. I pay, I think, $4.99 / month for whatever tier of storage. But I have multiple devices syncing through it, so I understand if that's not a value-add for one phone.
https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/icloudpd/icloudpd/
https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...