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Comment by open_ | Hacker News Reader

My current process for offloading photos off the iPhone is to copy them in subsequent batches of '0-9999' from the 'Image Capture' app.

This is because I usually have far more than 10K photos and apple starts renaming the files after 9999 as 00001(1) for the rest. This is pretty undesirable.

Is there a way for me to export unmodified raw/jpeg/live/videos off the iphone to an external drive without a macbook with a large enough ssd, and wanting to use icloud as an intermediate bottleneck?

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I use libimobiledevice on linux

plug iphone into usb. lsusb should show it.

I backup my photos with:

  sudo ifuse -o allow_other /mnt
  rsync -a /mnt/DCIM <photos-dir>
  sudo umount /mnt

Actually, I backup all of /mnt not just DCIM, but that answer is for you. I also backup the entire phone with:

  sudo idevicebackup2 backup <backup-dir>

but in this form it either does the photos as data files, or doesn't back them up. I think it is a complete backup.

Do you take into account the iPhone not holding the original images of every photo? It will offload originals and just keep thumbnails if the library is too large.

Mine is approaching 1.5TB, I’ve got no hope of keeping that all on an iPhone, and also no guarantee that any given photo is fully available locally.

Aren't there hooks on the filesystem layer that downloads them when you access them? E.g I can browse via terminal to my iCloud Drive somehow and cat etc works on files which aren't local (after locking to download them first).

> Do you take into account the iPhone not holding the original images of every photo?

If you have enough storage space on your iPhone, you can select "Download and Keep Originals" in the photo app settings.

I think the originals and edits are both there.

I don't know about space-optimized storage on-phone. I know one setting for transfer to mac or pc - I have it set to "keep originals" instead of "automatic". There might be other settings I'm not aware of.

EDIT: actually, there are other directories (under /mnt but outside DCIM in my example) that seem to have other photo stuff, maybe edits? ymmv

> My current process for offloading photos off the iPhone

I'm not sure about Linux, but my workflow on Windows and MacOS is to frequently back up my iPhone locally (which you should do anyway because few incorrect PINs can security lock your phone [1]) and use utility like backup extractor (e.g. [2] but there are many others) to extract all photos from the backup. This effectively removes the need to use iCloud.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105090?device-type=iphone

[2]: https://github.com/joz-k/ios_backup_extractor

Does the PhotoSync app permit that? I use it to copy files to my NAS but it has some USB-related options I never explored. I used to use Image Capture but heard of PhotoSync and have never looked back.

That looks like it might do the trick. I feel like this should be something possible only using first party apps but I'll take it! Thanks.

I use and like PhotoSync but I thought it doesn’t export unmodified originals but your edited versions. Personally I like this behavior better but that might not be what you want?

I’m not sure Apple allows any third party app to access the unmodified originals. Imagine you crop a photo to remove some embarrassing part. A third-party app can just recover that? What a privacy risk.

Of course this won’t matter if you don’t do any photo editing on iOS.

It's right to question this. I had taken https://www.photosync-app.com/support/basics/answers/does-ph... ("PhotoSync transfers the original, unaltered images including all EXIF and GPS data") on face value without thinking of all of the iCloud behavior. Even limited copies would suffice in my case, but that's insufficient for others.

With Photosync I have our photos export to my NAS and have it update the file names with the timestamp + original file name, which makes it so much more sane to sort through.

Example:

Original: IMG_9999.JPG

Server-side file: 2015.01.15__IMG_9999__.JPG

I did it on Linux once I extracted them all as-is in the strange storage way that iOS stores them but I dont recall steps to make it mount the drive.

That would be perfect, I might chase down this path again. It's been a while since I've tried to directly mount the iphone as a drive on linux.

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