I Regret the Blood Pact I Have Made with iCloud Photos

Exporting originals just hangs for me. Opening or switching a photos library is basically hoping the Mac doesn't crash. Edits are locked inside the database, with no hope of ever getting them out. And god forbid you put the library on an external drive - never unplug it! It's a horrible piece of software.

I regularly back up my Photos library using rsync to prepare for the worst. From the files I see it looks like all the originals are there under /originals, albeit renamed to some UUID hash. However the EXIF data and contents seem to be intact. The number of files and their names are also stable. The database seems to be a basic sqlite DB.

I think it might make sense to extract the files directly that way, and try to see how the DB stores the original filenames. Might not be too hard. The edits though I think are applied "live" (at least for video) so it's probably impossible to get them out this way.

Good quote from the author's earlier post about iCloud Photos:

> Software and services need a warranty. Until they have one, we completely control how much we value our data. That is the best we can do.

Best to treat these photo sharing apps, commercial or open source, as social media. Would you use Instagram or Flickr to store your most important photos and delete your own copies? I would not, same applies to Apple/Google Photos and similar apps. Besides the risk of the company suddenly shutting down or (more realistically for big tech) changing how their service works in a way that makes it useless to you, even if self hosted it just adds a bunch of things that could go wrong which don't apply to keeping it in a folder somewhere with an offsite backup. Filesystems don't have a warranty either, but at least they're easier to reason about.

Sad to hear that. Compared to previous versions of Photos.app, the functionality and strengths of the new app look completely off-track, very likely influenced by the iPhone's Photos app and project Marzipan introduced in Mojave if I'm not mistaken. I believe that Apple shouldn't have united these codebases and should've kept Photos.app on macOS a powerful and versatile organizer, to compensate something which a mobile app will suck at, by definition.

btw there's a separate TOPIC on GitHub for the tools that operate on iCloud Photos library, so if you'll ever need to repeat a one-way sync from iCloud, you can check e.g. https://github.com/steilerDev/icloud-photos-sync

Step 1 - login to iCloud.com > request privacy manual download; use multiple links to download all old/prior photos locally, use immich or DigiKam if you don’t like file explorer

Step 2 - use iCloudPD to auto download photos from iCloud in the future

I regret as well. Thinking to move to immesh. But for me live photos is the issue, I don't know of a good solution for making sure live photos are backed up and work, so many little moments in those videos.

Dude get off the train. I run a self hosted immich instance for myself and some friends. I deleted all my Google photos from my Google account and I don't miss it. Alternatives exist. I love being able to automatically share my photos with my partner, or create shared albums that other people can upload into. All my photo syncing happens automatically via sync thing, but less technical friends use the immich phone apps and say it works fine for them.

I'm damn glad I never started giving my photos to the cloud, be it Apple or Google.