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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. How did it work getting your photos off of iCloud? Does Apple give you a good way to get an archive of all of your photos? That is, the original quality photos, without manually downloading them individually? (I currently have 446 GB of photos in iCloud…)

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Immich iOS app supports backing up photos directly from iCloud in original resolution, with the all EXIF data included. I had 230 GB of photos myself, and I left the phone on the charger overnight with the app running in the foreground and screen locking disabled. In the morning everything was imported.

Some people have instead set Photos app on a Mac to download original photos from the iCloud library and then moved the files directly into the server. I have not personally tried this method though.

> Immich iOS app supports backing up photos directly from iCloud in original resolution

wait that is just crazy!!! Dang my dad is going to flip out when I tell him about this. He's got like 1.5 TB of photos in iCloud and has been searching for a way to get them off. And we're so close to our family storage limit that he gets mad at me when I text him pictures hahaha

There is a community-supported CLI program called immich-go that directly supports reading in iCloud and Google takeout archives, as well as local directories. It works great, and has gobs of import options to set up albums and tags. [ https://github.com/simulot/immich-go ]

i havent seen anyone else mention it so i will. privacy.apple.com lets you export your apple data similar to google takeout

That's the worst service I've ever seen. It asks you the size of each zip file and I said 50G at first. And I couldn't download it because the connection was so unstable. No way to resume it and every 20~30 mins, it failed in the middle. Chrome, firefox, safari were all the same. I tried from a GCE VM as well to see if that's my network problem but didn't help.

I had to request again with 2G and I was able to download files finally. But only one by one. And after download 3~5 files, I had to login again as their login expires so frequently.

I had to do that for days and the download got expired. Oh my god. I had to request it again. And you know what? Their file list wasn't deterministic. I had to download from the beginning. lol

I finally made it and I swear I will never use any cloud service from apple.

Same issue has been going on for me with just about any big download from apple serves. Could be icloud. Could be xcode. Doesn’t matter. It will randomly fail in the transfer and require manual intervention to restart. Been this way for years.

iCloud Photos Downloader isn’t user friendly or pretty, but I finally managed to rip my entire collection without having to install any apple software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578921

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