Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208514

by brunoluiz • 5 years ago

558 347 5 years ago

support.apple.com

This article is a little weird. The title is actually "Transfer a copy of your iCloud Photos collection to another service" but then the small print says "...to Google Photos."

It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet?

It also only allows customers from a small fraction of countries to use this, which I really don't get. Maybe those are all the places iCloud Photos and Google Photos are currently available together? But I don't get that either.

reaperducer3• 5 years ago

It seems like they plan to support migrating to other services at some point but not yet?

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.

miles2• 5 years ago

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

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").

sigjuice2• 5 years ago

Easy bulk downloads to the desktop (and hopefully to any attached external drive) would give me real peace of mind. Right now, I am a bit nervous with iCloud being the only full copy of my photos. None of my computers have enough storage to hold all my photos.

It would be even cooler if my Synology could download all my photos directly from iCloud.

enra• 5 years ago

You can do this with the Windows iCloud app. Just downloaded 7000 photos through it.

londons_explore2• 5 years ago

It'll be countries where Apple is facing anti-trust complaints.

jonas212• 5 years ago

Yeah, just a small fraction of countries, like the United States and the European Union. I'm sure nobody cares about those places.

jakemal• 5 years ago

Yes, only a billion people in the wealthiest countries in the world who are most likely to own an Apple device.

BugsJustFindMe6• 5 years ago

Can you think of any reasons why it would be limited to just those countries? Note that I'm _not_ asking why those countries are nifty. I'm asking what you think Apple gains by limiting it to just those countries in the first place or would lose by not limiting it to just those countries. The feature technology would be the same regardless of where you are, so saying "only available to users in X" seems like an arbitrary restriction. And there are surely orders of magnitude more Apple iCloud users in Japan or India than in Liechtenstein.

user-the-name• 5 years ago

That is, in fact, a small fraction of the world population.

grishka2• 5 years ago

Is there a good reason for the code implementing this to know anything at all about the fact that the world is divided into countries? I don't think there is.

wlesieutre• 5 years ago

The actual transfer page also says "Choose where you’d like to transfer your photos:" and has a dropdown titled "Select destination"

There's nothing but Google Photos to choose from now, but the intent is definitely to support other services.

dangwu4• 5 years ago

It's the first part of the Data Transfer Project - an initiative between major online service providers to provide an easy way to transfer data between their services.

krrrh2• 5 years ago

That's interesting, and it's the first I've heard of the project. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Apple has yet released the adaptors to the open source project [1]. As much as I'm not interested in having Apple copy my photos to Google, I am very interested in scripting my own offline backups without having to make space for Photos.app to store all my photos on my laptop's SSD. Hopefully the adaptors are added to the project soon.

[1] https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/tree/master/...

codercotton• 5 years ago

For those curious - https://datatransferproject.dev

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

Ah, easing of travel restrictions often accompanies a diplomatic thaw.

varispeed9• 5 years ago

This is quite elaborately dishonest as data portability is one of the requirements of GDPR that came to life in 2018. It's not like suddenly those giants decided to be good companies and allowed data transfer between services. It looks like they use it as a PR piece and at the same time trying to ensure that users won't flock to competition that has not signed to their thing.

lupire7• 5 years ago

Sounds like a trust to keep minor providers out of the market.

nelox• 5 years ago

AKA the Anti Anti-Trust Project

msh• 5 years ago

Then we are only missing google providing the same service!

(I know of google takeout, which is great but not the same as this)

1f60c• 5 years ago

Yup. For those of us with slow WiFi, Google Takeout is basically unusable.

slaymaker19072• 5 years ago

If you really want to get those files, you could try using a VM on a fast network (not sure which cloud offering would be best for this in terms of bandwidth cost).

This is not ideal at all, just suggesting a trick I've used in the past as a workaround for big downloads on an unreliable network. Obviously Google should just improve their service.

throwaway3699• 5 years ago

FWIW, you can do a takeout to another service like OneDrive or another Google Drive account and use their clients to sync. You can probably use wget to download in a more stable way, too.

kuyan• 5 years ago

I've had the same experience. The worst part is that you can only retry a download of a Google Takeout archive so many times before it locks you out, and you have to wait a day or so for a new takeout...

VladimirGolovin• 5 years ago

Takeout is NOT great, at least in my case. I never once managed to fully download my photo archive, despite my repeated attempts. I gave up, so my current "strategy" for keeping my photos safe is "Never ever do anything that might make Google algorithms think that I'm violating their ToS".

jkingsman2• 5 years ago

Yup, when I do my quarterly "Takeout everything" I always separate the photos request out because it takes 3-4 attempts to get it to work. Every single other service? Almost always works first time, even when they're all combined. Photos is the problem child.

anotherQuarter• 5 years ago

I recently moved photos from google photos to icloud using google takeout and it removed meta data from the vast majority of my photos.

Photos with correct dates and locations in google photos not longer have any of that data in icloud. Makes icloud photos a lot less usable, not sure if anyone else has had this issue (can't find any articles on it)

Anyways agree that google takeout needs improvement.

jkingsman2• 5 years ago

They will usually attach metadata in JSON files accompanying the downloads if it's not attached to the photos, in my experience.

cube2222• 5 years ago

Is there similar functionality for the other way around?

So basically a simple migration from Google Photos to iCloud?

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

This should be what you're looking for: https://takeout.google.com

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

Takeout is table stakes for Google’s position in the market. They really need to better support 3rd parties making a Takeout request on behalf of a user, and those services then retrieving the Takeout bundle for ingestion.

nlgfd• 5 years ago

nah it's not the same - I migrated from Google Photos to OneDrive last month and while it did migrate everything to OneDrive for me, it put everything into little 10GB .zips that I had to download, extract, re-upload.

asadlionpk• 5 years ago

I would love that as I have to move my family from Google to iCloud.

ncann• 5 years ago

A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon, but it's still miles better than iCloud Photos in almost everything. From search, to timeline overview, to seamless integration with my Chromecast, to automatic face tagging, to editing.

janlaureys• 5 years ago

Anecdotal annoyance with automatic face tagging: Old dog and new dog look very similar. Google keeps tagging my new dog as if he were my old dog and I haven't found a way to fix that without manually going through every single picture and untagging/retagging.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 5 years ago

I'm just amazed these services have face tagging for dogs, and that you consider it so obvious that you feel like complaining about it.

mav3rick2• 5 years ago

You can manually go and say "this is my new dog" to improve the tagging.

jeffbee• 5 years ago

On the web site, go to "explore" and pick the face of either dog, it should offer a little button that says "Same or different?" that will give you an opportunity to train it.

coralreef• 5 years ago

Not concerned with handing all that data to Google?

lorec0re• 5 years ago

Alupis4• 5 years ago

A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon

Google has always charged for storage in Google Photos - it's part of your "Google Drive" storage quota. They do give you 10GB free though, which can be substantial for a lot of folks.

prlin• 5 years ago

There was a free tier of photos and videos under a certain resolution which didn't count towards your storage which they're removing.

bracketslash• 5 years ago

They have also always had unlimited uploads for free at lower quality.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 5 years ago

Photos.app search has drastically improved ever since it started to use AI. I believe it was a search for "paper" that I did not too long ago, and which came up with several photos that were practically where-is-waldo games for me trying to find the paper.

tspike• 5 years ago

How about privacy?

izacus2• 5 years ago

I haven't seen any of my photos given out to anyone, so what's your concern? The ToS also doesn't say anything about sharing my private photos.

jftuga• 5 years ago

Workaround: install the Google Opinion Rewards app which is even available on iPhone. It will ask you survey questions about places you have recently visited. (Yes, it tracks you). Over the course of a year, you can earn $20 in "virtual" money which can then be used to purchase the 100GB/year plan.

comeonseriously3• 5 years ago

You can (I do) earn that much without location sharing. But I've been doing it for a long time so I seem to get more surveys than I did at first. Looking at my history, I average just shy of 1.75/month.

acdha• 5 years ago

Search is a mixed bag: Google configured it with low thresholds and was resistant to adding an error correction mechanism, so e.g. “cat” would match my dog and there was nothing I could do about it.

The main thing, however, is the social features. iCloud just works and works well. Google Photos UI was really clunky and notifications weren't reliable so I'd miss comments from relatives.

lupire7• 5 years ago

Maybe that's all worth $20/yr for photo and file storage?

airhead9692• 5 years ago

Doesn't the Google Photo app do this already without waiting? Is there a use-case for this?

navanchauhan• 5 years ago

If I understand correctly, this directly transfers data from Apple’s server to theirs.

You don’t need to even install their app.

airhead9692• 5 years ago

Seems like a one-time export, unless I'm wrong.

CloudHQ used to synchronize content between clouds but they seem to have fewer features these days.

LegitShady3• 5 years ago

I migrated away from Google Cloud storage this year given their announcement. The Microsoft office 365 family deal made at more sense. I can't see myself using Google cloud storage in the future given the premium they're charging. Moving the data wasn't that hard.

izacus2• 5 years ago

"Premium" being 2.5$ a month for 200GB of storage space?

Alupis4• 5 years ago

Well, in fairness, Microsoft's Office365 subscriptions conveniently include 1TB of OneDrive storage. So, if you already need the other Microsoft Office apps, and are already going to pay for them, you essentially get 1TB of cloud storage "for free".

LegitShady3• 5 years ago

Microsoft charges less per user for 1tb and msoffice 365 if you can find 5 family members to share the family plan with.

So yes if if an get it elsewhere for cheaper it's a price premium.

mnutt2• 5 years ago

I was surprised that Google's iOS app ignores iOS Photos' albums and favorites, and is practically the only app on my phone that doesn't allow me to share a picture into it from the camera/photos app.

I went ahead and wrote my own app that provides the share extension and hooks up to the Google Photos API, but even with that I can't write photos to albums that weren't created by my app. It seems like Google _really_ doesn't want me to get photos into Google Photos for some reason?

dangwu4• 5 years ago

The Google Photos iOS app just uploads all photos that my iPhone takes automatically, regardless of album. Yours doesn't?

sdljfjafsd• 5 years ago

The issue is you have an existing photo in your iCloud that is not in your camera roll (which is something iOS can automatically do so many people have this use case) there was no easy way to transfer those photos to Google.

mnutt2• 5 years ago

My iPhoto photo set is much, much larger than Google Photos storage cap; I just want to share a couple of photos with family. But yeah, that sort of explains it. They're pushing you to just store everything in Google Photos.

treesknees2• 5 years ago

This is something I miss from Android. I could tell Google Photos to ignore my downloads and screenshots albums, but iOS you either need to manually select photos to upload, or upload all photos.

janaagaard2• 5 years ago

I was surprised that Google's iOS app ignores iOS Photos' albums and favorites.

They recently made it possible to synchronize favorites between Google Photos and Apple Photos. Beware that turning this on resets the favorites you had made in Google Photos, keeping just the ones you have in Apple Photos, but once it has been turned on the synchronization seems to go both ways between the apps.

jrullman• 5 years ago

Part of the Data Transfer Project? https://datatransferproject.dev/

s1k3s• 5 years ago

Also, wasn't this mandatory in EU? Something related to GDPR?

hkh28• 5 years ago

Yes, data portability is a requirement in the GDPR. You should not be locked in to a service just because they have your data.

smoldesu2• 5 years ago

For those of you wanting a way to get your photos out of Google, I recommend https://takeout.google.com

I used it last week to migrate my Google photos to Nextcloud, it was pretty painless.

ShamelessC• 5 years ago

Word of caution - if you use Google Drive it will happily quickly dump as much as 200 GiB in your drive. if you don't have enough space, you get an incomplete download and five other Google services complaining you've run out of space.

sodality2• 5 years ago

Mine is 350+. I dumped it on a HDD and forgot about it, came back the next day and it wasn't done. For some reason I was being throttled, I restarted the download and it was fast again. They sure do have a lot of data on me :(

tcit• 5 years ago

Nextcloud now has an app to migrate your Google data (files, photos, calendars and contacts) straight away.

philposting3• 5 years ago

I used https://www.raidrive.com/ which lets you mount Google Photos as a (read-only) drive in Windows.

jedberg• 5 years ago

Is this to avoid some sort of monopoly accusation or the result of new data protection rules?

dangwu4• 5 years ago

It's part of https://datatransferproject.dev/

dartharva3• 5 years ago

Unrelated, but this reminds me of a recent incident. A friend came over to me asking for help transferring his WhatsApp chats from his old iPhone to his new Android phone. Turns out there is no official/practical way to do that, and he lost all hos chat and media records made across years (WhatsApp is the main mode of communication here, it's like opening up your official mail inbox one day and finding it completely empty).

He said he had lost them earlier as well, when he had migrated to an iPhone from an Android.

XCSme• 5 years ago

I also lost all my WhatsApp history and data when I added WhatsApp to a new phone. Weird that it can only be active on one device.

Jtsummers• 5 years ago

The issue is how the data is backed up on Android vs iOS. In theory, if your iCloud or Google account is the same between devices then transfer to a new, same-OS device is trivial. It should "just work" in most cases. But WhatsApp does not provide its own backup service (which is fine with me) nor does it allow you to specify where to back it up to (which is not fine with me). If it did, then users switching between iOS and Android would have no (or little) trouble.

drops• 5 years ago

That's actually kind of insane. Seamless transfer would take quite a high priority on the scale of things to implement, one would (and will) imagine. Transferring from and iPhone to an iPhone is so well-done that it actually adds to the pleasure of having a new phone.

This sounds like something a fanboy would say, but honestly it's just a really rather objective comparison of the functionality.

mav3rick2• 5 years ago

It's because Whatsapp backs up to Google Drive and iCloud respectively. I have no idea why the backup format can't be agnostic of what it's backed up on. That would make the syncing logic agnostic as well.

tokamak-teapot3• 5 years ago

Maybe it is. It’s encrypted though so could be hard to check.

krrrh2• 5 years ago

It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy. Even people who are aware that e2e encryption is only enabled on Telegram when you explicitly open a private chat soon abandon it because it lacks multi-device support which makes it easy to miss messages.

WhatsApp has always simplified their security model by not even attempting to support multiple devices (the desktop app communicates via your phone instead of directly with the servers). This greatly simplifies the server infrastructure for WhatsApp too, but there really is no good excuse for them not supporting portable local backup and restore after all these years.

For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.

goatinaboat• 5 years ago

It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy

Telegram has a feature to import all of your WhatsApp history, but I haven't tried it yet.

kitsunesoba• 5 years ago

It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy.

Persistent, multi-device conversation history might not seem valuable at first glance, but I can say that it's saved me a lot of trouble numerous times. In theory one could back up important messages from WhatsApp/Signal as they show up, but the problem is that the vast majority of the messages that end up being valuable at some point down the road are precisely those that seemed inconsequential in the moment. By the time you realize you need them they've been long deleted.

dartharva3• 5 years ago

Indeed, Telegram's appeal comes more from its superior feature set than privacy. It is very convenient to have everything backed up server-side and seamlessly run the same chat app on as many and as various devices as you wish.

For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.

We tried that and a number of other apps, even a paid one. It apparently only worked with older versions of WhatsApp.

nikon• 5 years ago

I used Wazzapmigrator to do this a couple of years ago

minikites• 5 years ago

Why would I transfer my photos into Google Photos, a service that Google will probably shut down in a year, once it has outlived its purpose of training their machine learning models? The only reason Gmail is still around is because of how valuable that data is for advertisers. Google can't run ads on your family photos so as soon as they have enough photos for their machine learning algorithms, they'll shut down the service. I can't imagine the thought process of someone who thinks it would be a good idea to migrate all of your personal photos to a service run by an advertising company.

soheil• 5 years ago

This is great I wish they’d give an option to just download all your photos as a zip file.

Rygian• 5 years ago

Seems to be a move in the right direction to be compliant with GDPR.

Article 20 [1] gives me the right to have my personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another controller (where technically feasible).

We should be seeing this kind of feature available in all services targeted at European citizens.

[1] https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-20/

qrbLPHiKpiux2• 5 years ago

How about just letting me be able to plug my phone into any laptop and drag and drop my pictures?

djrogers• 5 years ago

You mean like has been possible since the first iPhone? Or am I missing something here - I plug in my iPhone and open the same Image Capture utility that I'd use with any other camera (or SD Card) and import my photos.

qrbLPHiKpiux2• 5 years ago

Import is different than drag and drop. The image folder doesn’t show on windows, linux, or even my Mac.

JAKWAI• 5 years ago

Increasing the UX of a product never seems to be a mistake. And of course switching to another device is also part of the User Experience.

codys• 5 years ago

While it's good that this is finally being provided, it's still somewhat amazing that there isn't any documented API to interact with iCloud.

One can of course, on Apple hardware, use apple proprietary APIs to do some things. Or one can use the iCloudJs stuff from a webpage.

But there's not an official/documented way to, say, write a program that runs on a Linux server to mirror photos in iCloud to disk (or access any other iCloud data).

There are reverse engineered APIs that folks can use to interact with it, but the official iCloud story has been data lock in.

grishka2• 5 years ago

If they did have official APIs, that would mean that someone would eventually make use of them to make an Android client. And that would be absolutely unacceptable. /s

nvrspyx• 5 years ago

Are you sure you meant to include that "/s"?

jpdaigle• 5 years ago

Oh yes. I'd love to be able to hook up Google Assistant devices to my iCloud reminders lists, so that "remind me tomorrow to call the doctor" spoken to the Google Home would just nicely become an iOS reminder.

m0dest• 5 years ago

You can set this up with IFTTT.

modeitsch• 5 years ago

It’s good that apple offers this but when you try to move your photos away from google photos It’s hard like hell

ransom_rs• 5 years ago

Isn't Google Takeout pretty easy?

jjcon• 5 years ago

Google takeout rips out a lot of metadata information and virtually all organization you had - there are a couple open source projects trying to replace or augment gphotos takeout so it is useable but as is it isn’t a viable option for large libraries

dangwu4• 5 years ago

If any Google Photos product people are here...

Since you're ending free unlimited photo storage, I badly want a feature that automatically finds all groupings of similar photos and deletes all but the best one (least blurry, most smiles, whatever you decide). Whenever I take photos, I tend to spam the shutter button, so I end up with 3+ photos of anything and everything. I could stay on Google Photos for many, many more years if I had this auto clean up capability.

elliottkember• 5 years ago

I don't know whether you're on iOS, but if you are, the app on the app store called "Gemini" has been a game-changer for me in this regard.

amazon_throw• 5 years ago

Is this the one? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gemini-photos-gallery-cleaner/...

(There are a lot of "Gemini" bitcoin apps, apparently...)

adrr• 5 years ago

Gemini is a great app. I wish apple photos or google photos had similar features. Even Lightroom needs it since 1/5 of my photos are out of focus.

Solocomplex• 5 years ago

Pixel motion photos Top Shot uses AI to do this.

boatsie• 5 years ago

I wish this existed as well but with the added element of AI based merging where it can take the best in focus faces (eyes open and smiling) and composite them into a single image. Seems very possible but I haven’t heard of an implementation.

ronyeh• 5 years ago

Google Photos used to have this! It had a auto magic filter that combined multiple shots into a magic shot with no blinks and all smiles.

Like most things from Google, the engineers and PMs on that feature got promoted and the feature eventually went away.

It was called Auto Awesome:

https://picasageeks.com/tag/combining-pictures-to-get-the-be...

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-trigger-the-Auto-Awesome-in-G...

I had some great results from that feature, e.g. from big group shots at a party.

darkwizard42• 5 years ago

+1. Based on all the other cool search capabilities they have around recognizing your face/people's faces/objects, I'm surprised they don't have a "recognize duplicates" / "recognize bad pics" filter yet...especially when they know you have a bulk or automatic upload into your Photos account from your devices.

lxgr4• 5 years ago

I'd second that, or alternatively just a plan that lets me upload unlimited photos for a monthly fee like Flickr used to do very early on.

mywacaday• 5 years ago

Google will give you 2 TB a year for $99, gives me some confidence that it won't go away as easy.

mikepurvis• 5 years ago

Honestly, though, it's still a bad experience browsing other search-based tags and having to wade through all these dupes. I'd rather a clean way of just removing them at the source.

Possibly a compromise could be an auto-collapse function where Photos shows it as a stack with the AI-proposed best pick on top, and an option to fan out and make your own judgment. That doesn't on its own fix the storage side, but it would be a small step from there to a one-click "trash everything from this stack other than the featured item.

Apple kind of does this with live photos, but it would be nice to have GPhotos able to figure it out as well after the fact, since we've all been doing the "take many pics of it just in case" thing since forever.

nicoburns3• 5 years ago

This exists. It uses you general google storage quota (shared with gmail, gdrive, etc).

SamBam2• 5 years ago

...and if any are here let me add:

Can we please please get a return of the Assistant-style creations? All that exists now is the Instagram Stories-style auto-playing albums. Does anyone actually like these better?

jcomis• 5 years ago

Or please allow me to re-upload previously uploaded "high quality" free photos to "original quality" once I pay. After years of being a paid customer I have still not found a way to do this.

SamBam2• 5 years ago

How are they going to recover the bits that were lost? It was free because the images were smaller.

aceazzameen• 5 years ago

You just reminded how the old Android camera app (maybe Samsung?) used to have a "best" mode. Snap some photos, review the best one(s) and only commit to saving your choices.

It was something that could have probably used a UX refresh, but was instead removed entirely in future phones.

I'd love if cloud services implemented something similar.

jcims3• 5 years ago

Lol two months ago I moved about 80GB of photos from iCloud to Google and it was an absolute nightmare. Nothing worked correctly through the entire collection.

lostlogin6• 5 years ago

Imagine a service which properly integrated your phone camera (such that messaging etc worked nicely) had a desktop app and allowed network storage and backup.

Have I just missed this application?

jcims3• 5 years ago

Oh there’s an application alright. Getting it to actually do its job is another matter entirely.

tokamak-teapot3• 5 years ago

I use iPhone + Apple’s Photos app on MacOS for this, but I also include Dropbox for backing up directly from the phone and from any SD cards from other cameras. I also make a backup copy of Dropbox myself.

morpheuskafka• 5 years ago

Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload? There aren't any other real competitors AFAIK, but still why not just make it a simple export rather than an integration that will require continual maintenance?

lxgr4• 5 years ago

Having both would be nice, but given the amounts of data available and the asymmetric nature of many residential internet connections, I think doing the upload themselves would be prohibitive for many users.

_jal• 5 years ago

My guess is this is designed for the lowest-common-denominator.

Sucking down a multi-hundred-gig tarball on a phone to turn around and re-upload sounds like a poor user experience to me, and Apple has opinions about those.

lostlogin6• 5 years ago

For me that would be a 600+ gig download. I wish I could do it, but it’s a little unwieldy.

jmfisch• 5 years ago

Convenience, speed, and technical difficulty (for the typical person, not HN reader). Definitely, I've faced this problem. My photo and video library on Google Photos is now much larger than the free space I have on any device. The hassle of downloading in chunks, just to re-upload (and heaven help anyone on an ISP with data caps) is huge. It's also probably very slow - consider the bandwidth between an Apple and a Google server - most likely in the 10Gbps range? Compare that with an average person doing 50Mbps down and then 8Mbps up. For a 500GB library that takes _hours_.

Denvercoder92• 5 years ago

Any idea why they built this to go straight to Google rather than just exporting in a standard format for Google to upload?

I'm of the (perhaps cynical) view that Apple is only doing this to satisfy their legal obligations under the GDPR, and GDPR requires direct transfer.

janaagaard2• 5 years ago

Probably because they want this to work for people who only have a mobile device. Agree that it would be nice to have an option to download everything.

y04nn• 5 years ago

Please add a way to export Notes also. I've not tried hard to export them because I still can access them, but I would like a way to export them to an archive.

Maxburn• 5 years ago

More ways to do this is nice but you could always download and upload. This isn't some amazing new thing that was keeping you from doing that.

graham1776• 5 years ago

I have the reverse problem...I need to liberate my 600GB of photos from Dropbox into iCloud. Any reccomendations without downloading the entire thing to an external drive and re-uploading?

m463• 5 years ago

If they're a privacy company, they should just offer a dedicated home server for this sort of thing.

personal icloud, with all the apple trimmings. It is ok to sell this to you and charge money.

baby• 5 years ago

I really really hate how locked I am on the products I own...

I pay for Apple music yet I can't play it on my Google home.

I use Google maps yet in some apps it forces me to use Apple maps (even though I don't have it installed).

I use Google photos, which I can't use to manage my photos in the native way that Apple photos do it.

Airdrop only works between Apple devices.

I use Chrome and yet some apps will just open links in Safari (iOS).

enos_feedler• 5 years ago

At least being able to move your photos out of Apple Photos is a step towards not locking you into Apple's ecosystem. I don't think the ultimate goal is removing lock in completely. It's a fools errand to try and defeat it. The goal should be to free you from being locked into a company that takes it too far. This creates free choice and a market opportunity for another business to serve people like you.

Also .. I thought Apple Music was added to Google Home? I thought Apple now allows you to choose Google Maps as default mapping app?

sigjuice2• 5 years ago

So far, Apple only allows changing the default web browser or email app.

rakoo• 5 years ago

It is a bit sad to see something as simple as "you can now take your photos and put them where you want" become a newsworthy article. This is yet another demonstration that Digital Feudalism is alive and well, and just like its ancestor, we need to get rid of it by empowering people to be their own self

Barrin924• 5 years ago

force protocols to be open would just about do it. People would trivially write cross-service applications on top and we could have an internet where people can freely move data around. Apple and Google would be delegated to the backend and users could choose the clients they want. It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous. We're stuck in the 19th century railroad industry.

AmericanChopper4• 5 years ago

It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous.

At what point do you become compelled to start transforming your web application into an open protocol?

somethingwitty12• 5 years ago

There is a lot of secret sauce in protocols. Those decisions can have serious positive/negative implications on performance and features. Making those easily available to everyone could potentially destroy a business.

Don't get me wrong, I've had to reverse engineer my share of proprietary protocols to get behavior I wanted (and would have loved to see them be open), but I don't think I can get onboard with the idea that requiring open protocols is trivial or noninvasive.

drstewart• 5 years ago

It's honestly so trivial and uninvasive of a regulatory matter it's ridiculous

You can't honestly believe this. Even if one agrees with making some things open protocols, potentialy by law (messenger, social networks), stating "it's trivial" to do such a thing is just the height of hyperbole.

azinman2• 5 years ago

So, someone (who?) comes out with a standard, and then everyone just freezes capabilities then? Nothing evolves? Or if it does, it does so very unequally? Already in this announcement is the non-transfer of Live Photos because presumably Google doesn't support it. Apparently they also have a 20k per album cap, which at that point you get different behavior than you're expecting. These are just a few examples of where things go wrong.

If we're going to legislate anything, I believe the right way is to force complete data export is made available via a reasonable API/process, which then allows people to independently evolve & progress, and competitors will then need to support (or not) what comes out on the other side. But customers then know they can always extract or simply backup their data themselves if needed.

d0mine• 5 years ago

http was open once and technically it is open now. Soon the complexity of the protocol will allow only the major corporations to implement it (and it is unclear whether that complexity helps most people).

ezekg• 5 years ago

It kind of baffles me that people really want so much regulation. We already have more than enough of it.

mszcz3• 5 years ago

Yeah, it's the "lets you" part that ticks me off. That's the reason I have both Google Photos upload and Dropbox Upload enabled. Don't want to wake up one time to find out my photos are gone because some algo had a bad day.

dkonofalski7• 5 years ago

You've always been "allowed" to move your photos from Apple Photos to Google Photos. The difference here is that Apple is doing it for you.

planb• 5 years ago

But you could always do this. Apple seems to go a step further and does this on your behalf. I think that’s newsworthy.

amelius• 5 years ago

I still can't insert a USB drive into an iPad without hassle.

varispeed9• 5 years ago

They were required to do this by law in the EU.

mbroncano• 5 years ago

Could you please elaborate on that? Which particular law are they abiding?

criddell• 5 years ago

And is Google required to do something similar to help users transfer their photos to a competing service?

dkonofalski7• 5 years ago

This is incorrect. The photos in Apple Photos and iCloud were already portable. Apple is now offering to do this for you which is the only notable thing about this. Nowhere in the GDPR does it say that a company has to move your data for you if requested. They just have to allow you to move it if you choose to do so and that was already the case.

Spooky23• 5 years ago

It is newsworthy considering that they did this without being forced to do so. Things like telephone number porting weren’t possible until the Federal government forced the issue

jpalomaki• 5 years ago

Take Gmail as an example. They provided nice way of allowing applications to access your mailbox. Then we got data mining apps which started using this for malicious purposes (with user consent). Now the API is only available for developers willing to go through security audit ($15k-75k).

10 years ago Facebook provided a pretty nice set of APIs and way to grant access to your data (for example photos, messages, friend lists) for 3rd party apps. What we got was 1000 quiz apps using these for data mining - with user consent.

Android is another example. Initially Google put little restrictions for data applications could access - with permission from user. We all know what happened.

I’m not saying we should stop trying to tear down the walled gardens, but this is not trivial problem to solve. Some users might be even better off with their data locked in the garden managed by Apple, Google or Facebook.

gumby• 5 years ago

Although I do consider "digital feudalism" a legitimate risk, I don't think this is a good example. An increasing number of people don't have laptops but instead just phones and game consoles, so so have no access to normal data-centric affordances.

There is a real risk but it's not that different from the pre cloud era: that of proprietary formats. Google Docs itself is proprietary (if you map the Google Drive files to your local filesystem in the style of Dropbox the actual local data store locally is just a URI). It's worse, but not a huge amount worse than having your files be a proprietary blob, say a Word file.

And there are of course innumerable services that have data that never leaves the cloud from Facebook at one extreme to various services such as Gantt charts that aren't downloadable in any meaningful way.

But as I said I don't think this one case is a good example: In the case of Apple's stuff, I can keep it all current on my laptop: just tell photos, iCloud files, music etc to keep a complete copy on the local disk (i.e. don't treat it as a chache) and then back up normally. Music, photos, etc are stored in normal files (JPEG and mp3). My IMAP client downloads everything (messages and attachments) so if I were willing to use iCloud mail or gmail everything would be backed up; ditto for my calendars and address book. This is the same for many other cloud providers like Dropbox.

RoadieRoller• 5 years ago

My criminal mind says this could be a way for Apple (and Later Google) to benefit more, from the difference in the price of their phones - Thanks to pricing based on Storage. Once they allow these photo storages to duplicate your data, you will need double the storage and phone starting line-up would be 256GB and upwards very soon. I think innovation to make money has saturated, and now it would be quirks like this to make more money per phone.

Triv888• 5 years ago

While it is sad that it is news worthy, it goes against Steve Jobs' ideology...

thombles• 5 years ago

There are options in the middle - e.g. in M365 Personal, camera uploads are deposited as plain old files in your OneDrive Pictures folder and the Win10 photos app is driven directly by that. I periodically take offline backups by copying my OneDrive to an external drive and sleep easy that I have all my stuff.

ljm• 5 years ago

I switched from OneDrive to pCloud for that reason, because this isn't a special feature... it's just how filesystems work.

My account isn't much more than a networked drive, so this idea of adding 'transfer to another cloud' or whatever is still a regression.

While we're here, read the title: "Apple now lets you..."

Lets? Oh, thanks for giving permission, Apple. I don't think any of this would fly under the GDPR's data portability provisions.

lilyball• 5 years ago

You could always download your entire iCloud Photos library and reupload it anywhere else you wanted, it’s just tedious. The noteworthy thing is Apple will transfer your photos to Google Photos entirely on your behalf, without you having to download a single photo.

fungiblecog• 5 years ago

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

fartcannon• 5 years ago

But if I don't pretend your photos live in an ephemeral 'cloud', instead of where they really are - on my server, how can I trick you into letting me hide them behind a worse-than-even-just-using-FTP webpage.

Walled Gardens Must Die.

luplex• 5 years ago

GDPR gives you this button. You can do a full data request. This was introduced for exactly this usecase, to make it possible to switch service providers.

Now only Google needs to be able to read Apple's format.

safog2• 5 years ago

Pretty sure even if Google doesn't support it explicitly, you'll have open source tools that can download + re-upload to Google.

kall2• 5 years ago

I would also like this button, but I would not be surprised if a good chunk of users have an icloud photo library so large that none of their apple devices could fit it in it's (underspeced) storage.

ProAm• 5 years ago

Just upgrade the SSD

dkonofalski7• 5 years ago

What an ignorant thing to say. You pretend like external hard drives don't exist.

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

This exists if you have a Mac. Set Photos to "Download Originals" in the settings and every photo will be downloaded to the "originals" directory in your photo library bundle.

goblin89• 5 years ago

If you want to get your photos out of iCloud but not using Photos, there’s a neat cross-platform Python CLI tool called icloudpd[0]. It uses iCloud API, supports 2FA, and has a variety of options to control what’s downloaded (e.g., by album).

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...

systemvoltage2• 5 years ago

Rsync, the command line even, is familiar to vanishingly small slice of the Apple user base.

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!?”

joncrane• 5 years ago

They don't have to make everyone type in `rsync -aBc foo bar` they just need to expose it in a way that rsync can work with it.

Then Apple themselves and developers in the ecosystem can create nice GUIs for the "typical Apple user."

foobiekr• 5 years ago

Well... In the end, you probably do want to back things up in a way that detaches the photos from iCloud sync issues.

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.

Black1014• 5 years ago

They would loose control if they allowed you to use modern tools that work well

pentae• 5 years ago

Would love to see this come to Apple Notes, it'd be great to be able to export just for backup purposes

philposting3• 5 years ago

There’s this nice app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12

moron4hire• 5 years ago

Aaaw, thanks Apple. You're a mensch.

-_-

abhayhegde• 5 years ago

Mind you, Google's free plan gives only 15GB space. Purchasing larger space requires unnecessary monthly expense. Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution.

comeonseriously3• 5 years ago

Yes, because iCloud and Google Photos shouldn't be considered the only piece to a backup solution.

treesknees2• 5 years ago

Google's storage plans start at $19.99/year for 100GB. For less than a cup of coffee every month I'm able to back up my photos wherever I am, search across photos, share them easily with iOS and Android users, easily buy larger prints and photo books.

Yes, there's the fact that Google scans photos. I personally find it really useful to search for an object or face in Google Photos that other services just don't do as well.

Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution

Well of course that's true. Nothing will beat owning a physical copy of your files in terms of backups/reliability in the worst cases. But you can always do both. Upload to the cloud and perform periodic account takeouts of your photos and store them to disk.

comeonseriously3• 5 years ago

I want them to support smb. I would like to be able to sync my photos to a network share. This doesn't mean I wouldn't still buy iCloud space.

vishnumohandas2• 5 years ago

If Apple opened up their APIs so that data could be imported by ANY authorized third party service, that would be fantastic. This post is about a behind-closed-doors deal with Google. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see a reason to celebrate.

varispeed9• 5 years ago

They have to do it by law (GDPR) if they want to sell their products in the EU. People should start making complaints that they cannot port their data to other services, then they should implement that in no time.

vishnumohandas2• 5 years ago

People should start making complaints

Do you know how to go about this? Thanks!

varispeed9• 5 years ago

They don't do any favour. They are supposed to allow it by law because of GDPR. If GDPR was not passed, I personally doubt Apple would do anything. They should allow export not only to Google Photos but also for yourself to download in a way that you could import it to any other photo storage service.

chrisshroba• 5 years ago

How are they obligated by GDPR to support server side data transfer to Google in particular? My understanding is that they are only required to make it possible for you to download your data so that you can upload it elsewhere if you'd like to.

varispeed9• 5 years ago

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

The right to data portability allows individuals to obtain and reuse their personal data for their own purposes across different services.

It allows them to move, copy or transfer personal data easily from one IT environment to another in a safe and secure way, without affecting its usability.

It doesn't say that they have to implement moving from one provider to another without you having to download the data, but I think the key phrase is "easily from one IT environment to another in a safe and secure way, without affecting its usability".

rsync3• 5 years ago

Does rclone[1] interface with iCloud Photos ? It works just fine with google photos[2] ...

Without installing rclone and without using any of your own bandwidth, you should be able to:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah gphotos:/blah

Or maybe you just want to keep a copy in your rsync.net account:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone icloud:/blah /your/dir/tree

[1] https://rclone.org

[2] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

jdxcode• 5 years ago

iCloud photos aren’t just jpegs in a directory

rsync3• 5 years ago

Take a look at the rclone targets list:

https://rclone.org/

In fact, most of them are not files in a directory - that's what makes most of the rclone use-cases so impressive. If they can interact with gdrive/photos/S3/etc. they should be able to interact with iCloud Photos ...

atdt• 5 years ago

Frustratingly, support for Google Photos in rclone is handicapped by the limitations of the Google Photos API: you can't download Photos at original resolution. This is documented on your second link.

rsync3• 5 years ago

That's unfortunate ... and I believe there are some other end-user ("consumer") products that also interfere with the direct mechanism that 'rclone' uses to request data.

oarsinsync2• 5 years ago

It works just fine with google photos

Second line in your link:

NB The Google Photos API which rclone uses has quite a few limitations, so please read the limitations[0] section carefully to make sure it is suitable for your use.

For anyone intending to use rclone to download their photos from Google Photos, be aware that you will lose EXIF data. If you download videos, they will be lower quality. There are more limitations in the link.

[0] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

dkonofalski7• 5 years ago

If they have a Mac, then yes. You can enable download of all full-resolution photos from iCloud to a Photos library which can be stored anywhere and is stored in a standard directory structure.

iso1631• 5 years ago

So I could transfer from icloud to google then import into digikam. Interesting

Why can't I just download a zip from icloud with my 13,000 photos/videos inside? Where's the API?

GNU_James• 5 years ago

Lets You Ye, no. I still spit on them.

sullysaas• 5 years ago

I have 992GB of photos stored in Google Photos and I desperately want something to transfer all of them FROM Google Photos to any other service.

Google Takeout fails to export all of my photos..

steren• 5 years ago

I have 400GB in Google Photos, and I am able to use Google Takeout to download them as multiple archives. I try to back them every 1/2 years on a hard drive.

Since I assume you are a Google One user. Maybe contact support and share your issue?

trimbo• 5 years ago

Does it actually miss data that should be there or does the Takeout fail?

elcomet2• 5 years ago

Did you try rclone ?

anaganisk• 5 years ago

Rclone can't download original quality files from google photos(API limitation)

hankchinaski• 5 years ago

i wanted to do the exact opposite, moving photos from Google to apple icloud but google takeout exports are a complete mess

jw14• 5 years ago

When is google going to offer to transfer my photos to iCloud? I've done it using their export.. it was a nightmare. Dates aren't preserved.

cryptoquick• 5 years ago

What, so Google can just go ahead and delete them?

seaman1921• 5 years ago

please reserve such comments to reddit

kccqzy• 5 years ago

Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo.

This is actually a dealbreaker. When I edit a photo, I expect the service to store both the original and the edited version, so that I can revert the edit or just look at the original version straight from the camera at any time. I have actually went back and looked at old edited photos I took, and found the edits to be way too heavy handed (too much contrast, too much saturation, etc) than I'd prefer today. One's taste as a photographer grows and changes.

Clampower• 5 years ago

Does anybody have a way do something like this from Google photos to a different host? I really want a second copy of stuff on Google photos, and takeout is completely unusable for me.

dzhiurgis• 5 years ago

Still missing Google Photos as offloading service. Which seems blatantly illegal.

p.s. I'd love to use iCloud if it wasn't so slow and buggy (watching old videos on Mac is basically a chore).

Pokepokalypse• 5 years ago

That's the last fucking place I want my photos.

When you run out of space, you're screwed.

subpixel• 5 years ago

Funny reading this while Apple re-uploads my entire 10+ year photo library _from an external drive_ back to iCloud after I fresh-installed Big Sur.

ftio• 5 years ago

Protip: go the other direction. I've found that re-downloading the whole thing into a new library is >10x faster than resyncing your local 'originals' with iCloud. I have no idea why this is, but I've done the 'download' method twice, and it has been so much faster and more reliable (and less stressful).

Black1014• 5 years ago

next thing, they will let you hold the copyright for your own pictures...

sdfjkl• 5 years ago

My photos are on my drive in a bunch of messy folders and I can transfer them wherever I want. Get your filthy clouds off my lawn.

owaislone2• 5 years ago

I so want to go back to this but after losing two of my 2 TB drives got corrupted in the past 15 years and now I'm scared of leaving everything on a drive. Perhaps a cheap S3 deep archive storage + a physical drive as main storage is the answer but then I won't have an app like Google Photos which is actually pretty great especially for sharing with family.

owaislone2• 5 years ago

Unrelated but does anyone know if the partner sharing photos in Google Photos costs double the storage? I know I can view my partners photos in the app but there is a "save" feature which allows me to save my partners photos to my own "galley". Does that mean the photo counts towards my Google One storage twice? I think it doesn't but I'm not sure.

donatzsky• 5 years ago

Pretty sure it only counts if you save them to your own library. Also, if you don't save them before turning off partner sharing, they'll disappear.

qwerty456127• 5 years ago

Truth is I don't want anything to be uploaded to Google, Apple or any other cloud. I want everything to go straight to my own server!

smasher164• 5 years ago

If iOS supported Time Machine backups, my NAS backup solution would be complete. It's crazy that we're either locked into iCloud or have to sync with iTunes.

Yes, I know about iTunes Wifi backup, but I'd rather not be on my home network for this.

punnerud2• 5 years ago

This is probably the effect of GDPR Article 20: “(..) the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible.“

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

asimpletune• 5 years ago

Wow that’s awesome, now I wish they’d add Amazon Photos as well.

batmaniam• 5 years ago

That's nice, at least everyone can have a secondary backup now. Although this part seems worrying:

Only the most recent edit of the photo is transferred and not the original version. Duplicates appear as just one photo.

What other caveats are there? I don't think people will like the data loss, I would want to keep the originals too.

swiley• 5 years ago

How about letting us just download a targz of them? Why is this so hard?

jqquah• 5 years ago

Now we just need to be able to transfer iCloud backup of Whatsapp to Google Drive

WhyNotHugo• 5 years ago

Curious to see this evolve.

Article seems to hint that it's just Google Photos "for now", but that may change in future.

I'd love to have it as a backup mechanism to dump all my photos onto an external hard drive. Doing it now is pretty non-trivial unless you have a mac.

Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos

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