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
It’s amazing how out of touch developers on HN are from the average Apple user. Completely, utterly, impossibly out of touch with reality.
Try to imagine proposing a project like this to the internal teams at Apple and being asked “Who is this for!?”
Then Apple themselves and developers in the ecosystem can create nice GUIs for the "typical Apple user."
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.
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.
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.
It helped me free up iCloud storage without filling up my SSD (which is what would’ve happened if I synced the whole library using Photos). I pointed icloudpd to one massive album with random Filmic footage, which I then transferred to external storage. Download took multiple runs due to size and network interruptions, thankfully the tool avoids redownloading already completed items.
[0] https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
Now only Google needs to be able to read Apple's format.
Custom 3rd party software is usually banned from a consumer cloud API for security reasons.
No incentive for Google to explicitly refuse photos from Apple for example.
The best solution I have found is to use Photos on the Mac to pull down all of your photos and then the osxphotos python project to export them with full metadata and tagging to the directory of your choice which you back up using other means.
Walled Gardens Must Die.