iCloud Photos Downloader

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader

by reconnecting • 6 months ago

653 248 6 months ago

reconnecting23• 6 months ago

Surprisingly, there is no official way to download all (400 Gb) photos from iCloud. Here is an open-source command-line tool to download all your iCloud photos.

cdrnsf• 6 months ago

I'm not sure it's surprising. Apple doesn't want you to leave and making something as important as your photos difficult to move helps with that.

lostlogin10• 6 months ago

What’s missing?

The files are there on the Mac, they are there to download on the cloud (various mentions of method mentioned here).

Tempest19812• 6 months ago

From 2024:

Users of Google and Apple’s photo cloud services can now transfer images between them. It was already possible to export photos and videos from iCloud to Google Photos, but now it can also be done the other way around: from Google Photos to iCloud.

https://www.techzine.eu/news/applications/122196/google-and-... (2023 Data Transfer Initiative (DTI))

kccqzy2• 6 months ago

That’s not true. On any Mac or iPhone you can choose the iCloud Photo Library storage option to download all instead of letting the system optimize the storage. And if you turn off iCloud Photo Library, it will also try to download it all. I know this because I stopped using iCloud Photo Library and that was how I got all my photos downloaded.

hu3• 6 months ago

that's good to know. can I then download the photos from iPhone to a backup hard-drive or transfer to a folder in my computer?

possiblerobot• 6 months ago

+1 to this method. After optimise storage is disabled on the Mac, wait for all photos to download. Then, open the photos library bundle and you'll see every photo there, full res. Copy them wherever you like.

Also, if you leave optimise storage disabled and continue to use Photos, every photo will be cloned in any local or cloud backups of your machine. This strategy creates additional photo redundancy separate from iCloud while still benefiting from library syncing.

Nextgrid2• 6 months ago

Thanks to Apple's exceptional software quality the app has plenty of bugs and good luck exporting a lot of files out of said library - you're in for an endless game of spinners (it does some network IO on the main thread), "not responding" and memory leaks.

But hey at least we've got Liquid (gl)ass now.

reconnecting23• 6 months ago

Okay, and if there are 300 or 500 GB of photos, how do you synchronise them with your iPhone?

nemothekid• 6 months ago

I think if you are on PC. But on Mac with the Photos App

Cmd+A > File > Export Unmodified Originals

reconnecting23• 6 months ago

There is no straight way to download photos from iCloud to Mac.

reddalo• 6 months ago

Technically, there is: users of the European Union can get a full export of all data that Apple has about them, including all the stored photos. It can be requested from here: https://privacy.apple.com/

catskull2• 6 months ago

I was able to request a photo dump as a non-EU customer using this link.

ireadmevs• 6 months ago

How does the archive they provide look like? Many zip files? I would like to retrieve them and offload to another storage service but I don’t have local storage enough to hold all of it at the same time, unpack and then reupload. I would need to do it in stages.

reconnecting23• 6 months ago

It sounds really weird that instead of making a separate utility, or allowing you to download iCloud Photos in the native Photos application on Mac, Apple requires you to go through a legal procedure.

I'm OK with clicking a button to download all photos to Mac, but there is no such button. Or maybe there was one previously, but it has now disappeared.

SchemaLoad2• 6 months ago

Doesn't work if you have Advanced Data Protection (end to end encryption) enabled.

nashashmi• 6 months ago

Vulnerability hijack incoming with the headline calling for another maintainer

tra3• 6 months ago

Does anyone know if there’s a way to self host/impersonate iCloud? I’d like to back my iPhone up locally.

yrcyrc• 6 months ago

For pictures you can use https://immich.app/

idorosen• 6 months ago

https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse might help.

nntwozz• 6 months ago

You can do manual backups in macOS using Finder, or iTunes on Windows.

Tepix• 6 months ago

There's also a Program called "Apple devices" I believe from Apple for Windows that will let you backup your iPhone/iPad.

If you configure a password for your backup it will backup more (confidential) data than if you don't encrypt your local backup.

dwayne_dibley• 6 months ago

Immich is probably the best option

mfkp• 6 months ago

Or ente photos: https://ente.io/

netsharc• 6 months ago

I'm sure grandparent meant to modify it so they'd just have to click "Backup to cloud" on their iPhone and instead of the iPhone sending their files to Apple's servers, it sends them to a local backup server...

vachina• 6 months ago

All the comment here fail to address the “view” part of iCloud.

I wrote a webapp to try to solve that for myself (https://github.com/yhling/go-web-image-gallery)

caminanteblanco• 6 months ago

I mean can't you go to privacy.apple.com, ask for an archive of your data, and then they'll email you the link to a zip file in a week or two? I'm pretty sure this is what my girlfriend did when she transitioned from an iPhone to a Pixel. I think there's even a specific checkbox for photos/videos

catskull2• 6 months ago

Thanks! I’ve been looking at options for this and didn’t realize Apple had an official method. Just submitted a request, we’ll see how it goes.

mmh00003• 6 months ago

Yes... Let me ask my corporate overload and wait 2 weeks for permission to download my family photos.

ericj5• 6 months ago

Wow, I will definitely give this a try. I have tens of thousands of photos in iCloud and I literally can’t export them all at once. Photos app chokes and crashes and manually babysitting smaller batches is a pain. It’s pretty clear they want to make it as hard as possible

CSDude• 6 months ago

All my vertical videos in iCloud show up cropped horizontal for some reason. If I go to edit I see the whole video. I really do not want to trust any cloud provider to maintain my years of archives of family photos and videos. Glad things like this exist. I just need properly date-foldered files, without no duplciates. Is that so hard?

Angostura• 6 months ago

Sounds like the contact sheet view is just using square preview thumbails?

CamperBob22• 6 months ago

All my vertical videos in iCloud show up cropped horizontal for some reason.

Turn your phone? /ducks

1love1heart• 6 months ago

There is something similar to Google Takeout for Apple Photos. Recently used it to download thousands of photos.

Dachande663• 6 months ago

I’ve been using this for several years now on a little unraid box to download new photos nightly. There’s a few docker containers that wrap in support for notifying when 2FA is required etc. Always makes me nervous, the access it has, but I’d rather have my photos backed up somewhere I own.

axpy906• 6 months ago

This great. I want to switch to android but the only thing stopping me is eight years of photos. No more.

wrxd• 6 months ago

If your end goal is to move the photos to Google photos have a look at https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10502587?sjid=13067...

neilalexander• 6 months ago

You can go to https://privacy.apple.com, log in with your Apple ID, select "Request to transfer a copy of your data" and then select "iCloud photos and videos to Google Photos".

punnerud2• 6 months ago

You know you only need to do a GDPR request to Apple (dedicated page), select images and you get a download link after a few hours

thierryzoller• 6 months ago

For those in the EU only ?

punnerud2• 6 months ago

Believe it work for everyone? I am located in Oslo/Norway, so can’t check if it does not apply everywhere.

Only need to go to this page to do the request https://privacy.apple.com/

j16sdiz3• 6 months ago

You can't really file a GDPR request, but the (self-service, web based) download tools works for everybody.

mmh00003• 6 months ago

I run this periodically from a little shell script; I "should" automate it, but time is scarce.

  ⟩ cat ~/bin/icloud_download
  #!/bin/bash
  mkdir "$(pwd)"/{photos,cookies} 2> /dev/null
  
  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" ]]; then
      echo "need env ICLOUD_USERNAME"
      exit 1
  fi
  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" ]]; then
      echo "need env ICLOUD_PASSWORD"
      exit 1
  fi
  
  podman container run -it --rm --name icloud \
      -v $(pwd)/photos:/data \
      -v $(pwd)/cookies:/cookies \
      -e TZ=America/Boise \
      icloudpd/icloudpd:latest \
      icloudpd --directory /data \
      --cookie-directory /cookies \
      --folder-structure {:%Y/%Y-%m-%d} \
      --username "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" \
      --password "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" \
      --size original

koolba• 6 months ago

icloudpd/icloudpd:latest

Passing your raw iCloud creds into the unverified latest tag is fine until it’s not. Better to pin to a specific tag or hash.

mmh00003• 6 months ago

You're not wrong. I know I need to put more work into it. Just haven't had time.

I'm "protected" by the fact Podman doesn't automatically update the latest image even when using the latest tag.

I was more showing how simple icloudpd is to use.

ccakes• 6 months ago

Seems to be looking for a new maintainer. If anyone has the bandwidth, it’s a great piece of software

jeanofthedead• 6 months ago

I'm a big fan of Parachute Backup for this purpose. https://parachuteapps.com/parachute

monocularvision• 6 months ago

Do you know if this supports multiple users? Can’t find mention of it in the site.

rgovostes4• 6 months ago

My concern with backing up iCloud Photos with anything but Apple Photos is that there are some proprietary formats like Live Photos and slow mo video for which exports are lossy. Also, Apple Photos stores all edits non-destructively, so 'flattening' the edits into a single file for export is also a lossy operation.

It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.

lostlogin10• 6 months ago

Could the first obvious improvement please be its speed? My god. The local Time Machine backup is slower on a 10gb network than Backblaze over the Internet. It isn’t even close.

dangus2• 6 months ago

Asking for anything out of Time Machine is a lost cause. It’s essentially a completed and legacy product.

I migrated to Linux + Pika Backup. For photos I use Ente Photos with their managed cloud storage plus a continuous export to my NAS.

Ente is surprisingly well integrated with iOS, you really don’t need to use Apple’s solution. It automatically backs up photos I take in the background.

varenc2• 6 months ago

I backup ~3-4GB a day with Time Machine to my local NAS and it takes less 10 minutes. Albeit it should take 30 seconds if it was maxing out the network speed.

rgovostes4• 6 months ago

I reinstalled my system and attempted for weeks to get Time Machine to complete a first backup. Every time I started it, the progress bar would fill up about 60% and then stall, and eventually kernel panic if the system was left idle for hours. Never happened before I reinstalled, though I have had it randomly decide the backup is corrupt and it has to start over. macOS deserves a better first-party backup feature.

dangus2• 6 months ago

In my experience migrating to another provider from iCloud, this hasn’t been a significant issue. Live Photos in particular are not really proprietary in the sense that they’re implemented in an extremely simple way that basically every photo tool understands. ~~Slow motion videos are also not proprietary, they’re just a plain video file.~~ <<< edit: I think I’m wrong about slow motion

rgovostes4• 6 months ago

Slow motion videos are also not proprietary, they’re just a plain video file.

I haven't looked into the implementation details, but Photos lets you adjust the section of the video that is played back in slow motion. I thought if you share a slow-mo video, it gets re-encoded to bake this in (i.e., one second at 240fps gets exported as four seconds at 60fps).

fn-mote• 6 months ago

How about just turning off optimized storage and letting Time Machine do its job?

rgovostes4• 6 months ago

I have a 1.2T photo library. Carrying that around on my MacBook requires an $800 upgrade to the SSD.

Time Machine's job is to back up my data, it's not strictly to make a 1:1 copy of local storage. It should back up my cloud data too.

SchemaLoad2• 6 months ago

The most annoying thing for me is if you set the date for a photo, it gets stored externally rather than modifying the photo metadata. So when you switch platform, every photo which didn't originally have a captured at date ends up reset to the current day every time you move.

For edits, I don't care too much about just baking them in since it's unlikely I'm going back to old photos and want to undo the crop.

kimos3• 6 months ago

I’ve used this tool for years and it’s great. But it really saves just the raw data. You’d never get it back in to Apple Photos as nice as when you pulled it out. Metadata is missing. Live Photos come out as an image and a similarly named video. But I treat it as the emergency backup. If some Apple DC burns down or they ban my Apple ID for some reason, at least the photos still exist.

jaffa22• 6 months ago

This. I don't understand why Apple don't have another checkbox beside the Download Originals to this Mac that reads 'Store Backup of Original Photos on Timemachine' This is all that's needed to solve the issue. I actually bought a Mac Studio, and a USB disk, just to be able to download originals of my photos for local backup, since a MBP is effetively a mobil limited device just like an iphone.

"I actually bought a Mac Studio"... "I don't understand why Apple don't " ... wait a minute

SilverElfin2• 6 months ago

Thanks. I cannot get iCloud sync to work at all. It consumes CPU, asks for logins repeatedly, etc but fails to actually do its job. When I think of its bugs and all the issues with the latest iOS (bugs and performance on recent hardware), I am thinking of exiting the Apple ecosystem entirely.

hannob• 6 months ago

You need an extra tool to download your own photos? That's... not a basic feature?

I'm always surprised what kind of antifeatures people in Apple land are willing to accept and still use those things...

cg5280• 6 months ago

You absolutely can download your photos, just not via command line like this project enables.

geekamongus• 6 months ago

You do not need an extra tool to download your photos. This one runs from the command line, though.

CharlesW2• 6 months ago

As is pointed out elsewhere in the thread, there are at three official ways to download your own photos. This complements those.

Razele• 6 months ago

why not use rclone

porjo2• 6 months ago

Because icloudpd supports downloading photos from icloud and rclone does not (yet): https://github.com/rclone/rclone/pull/8734

rsync• 6 months ago

"why not use rclone (?)"

This is the correct - and obvious - response to something like this.

Unfortunately, I believe that rclone has no support for iCloud photos at this time.

rcarmo• 6 months ago

I created this over the holiday break to do mostly the same:

https://github.com/rcarmo/PhotosExport

...when you try to export files using the (restricted) APIs we get, it automatically triggers a download.

porjo2• 6 months ago

I use this to sync my wife's photos to Immich and it works great, however the auth process is a bit of a pain (not the fault of icloudpd) and have to reauth every few months.

kimos3• 6 months ago

It is a pain.

I’ve wrapped it in some short scripts which notifies on auth failure and it’s an easy process to run the auth script. But there’s no way to avoid the bi-monthly inconvenience I don’t think.

shireboy• 6 months ago

I was just thinking about this today. Apples lack of any 3rd party integration for things like this and iMessage is really annoying sometimes. In addition to a secondary backup, I’d love to automatically sync some photos from a certain album to my parents photo frame. Or if I take a nice nature shot have it sync to a Samsung frame tv. I get the benefits of the walled garden but esp w photos and messaging it seems like opening up a little would allow for some innovation

jackvalentine• 6 months ago

I use PhotoSync on my phone for this - select which albums to sync where with a rule and away you go.

DHPersonal• 6 months ago

Parachute Backup is a tool I use: https://parachuteapps.com/parachute

ndegruchy• 6 months ago

While not free, and not for any other platform than macOS. The program Parachute[1] in the App Store is very nice in downloading both photos from your library as well as files from the various locations.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?...

SilverElfin2• 6 months ago

Is there a way to verify this all is safe to use? Like it won’t do something weird privacy wise? Any equivalent for windows?

reconnecting23• 6 months ago

I have the same paranoia, so I was happy to learn that someone made an open-source downloader for iCloud.

malshe• 6 months ago

Thanks for the link

teamspirit• 6 months ago

Anyone know if it works with ADP? I emailed them months ago but no one ever replied.

On a related question, is there a download solution that does work with ADP? I’m looking to mitigate any potential account lockout issues for family members (and, no, they will not switch out of the ecosystem).

arcanemachiner• 6 months ago

Advanced Data Protection

8fingerlouie2• 6 months ago

It does. It uses PhotoKit to access photos, so it basically uses your Apple Photos app (iOS or Mac) to download the photos.

The only scripted solution I can think of that works with ADP is osxphotos[^1], but that also uses PhotoKit, and requires the user to be signed in.

Personally I use PhotoSync [^2] to backup our photos from phones to a NAS. It works reliably, and supports exporting unmodified originals as well as edited versions, and XMP/AAE metadata alongside it.

^1: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

^2: https://www.photosync-app.com/home

8fingerlouie2• 6 months ago

It works well enough, but it's not without flaws either.

The desktop version works reliably, if you can get macOS to keep shares mounted for long enough, and mount them on request. The scheduler is also kinda wonky.

The iOS version has so far never finished an incremental backup overnight of our ~1TB individual libraries. It handles resume/suspend well, but for some reason, while it exports unmodified originals, it doesn't include AAE files, which the desktop version does.

PhotoSync does everything right, with the exception of trying to keep state of what has been exported, which makes little sense as it doesn't support restoring photos.

dawnerd• 6 months ago

Another option for iOS at least is PhotoSync. It’s nice, you can pull from photos and push to basically any remote service or local server. I have it backing up to both my nas and b2.

jojohack• 6 months ago

Became more fascinated with the history of my small hometown (Paris, Texas) TLDR: Much of it was wiped out by a 1916 fire. I spent some time recently vibe-coding this interactive map to provide some kind of historic visualization ( which enabled me to see the impact better ) https://gorch.com/parisfiremap/

submeta2• 6 months ago

I pay around 10 euros a month to apple just so I can sync my photos from iphone to mac and ipad. That’s the only reason I need the 2 TB for icloud service. With an app like this I could download and keep copies and get rid of iCloud subscription?

pgalvin• 6 months ago

This will let you download all of your photos that already exist on iCloud Photos.

Going forward, you’d want to set up some other way to sync photos you take from your phone to your other devices. I can personally recommend Synology Photos for simplicity[1], or Immich[2] for an open-source (and in my opinion, slightly better) alternative you can run on any hardware, if you’d like to set up an always-on NAS. These are “Apple Photos” or “Google Photos” equivalents that you host yourself.

Alternatively, something like Syncthing[3] is a dead-simple way to sync your photos to various other devices as and when they are online, if you’d prefer to manage your photos in an ordinary file manager.

I’d be remiss not to mention that, for any solution where you move off the cloud to a central storage location of your own, you really must make backups to keep your photos safe. The 3-2-1 rule is a standard recommendation.

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/photos

[2] https://immich.app/

[3] https://syncthing.net/

submeta2• 6 months ago

Thank you very much for the detailed reply. I have a Synology NAS, will look into that solution.

qaid• 6 months ago

Is there an iCloud Photos uploader?

I have a script to scan files from my camera and add a compressed copy to a folder. This folder was supposed to work with the iCloud for windows (10) program, but one day it just stopped working.

jeremymaluf• 6 months ago

Does anyone have any idea for why Apple makes it so difficult to keep photos downloaded?

For context, try tapping 'optimize photos' in iPhone storage settings and then figure out how to turn off the feature without using Google. Not only is the toggle nearly impossible to find, but it's also hidden from being searchable

deafpolygon• 6 months ago

For context, try tapping 'optimize photos' in iPhone storage settings

Same place it’s always been. In Settings -> App -> Photos, toggle Download and Keep Originals. Same place it is for macOS as well. It’s not that magical. Search for “photos icloud” and you’ll be led to the setting for it.

WhyNotHugo2• 6 months ago

I’ve been using usbmuxd+ifuse to copy the photo files straight from the phone. No need to wait for an upload/download to some remote server, just a direct cable from the phone to my computer. I get the original files, and can even move (instead of copy) to clear up the phone.

kimos3• 6 months ago

This works on any iPhone? It mounts the non-privileged DCIM folder or whatever over USB to somewhere on your filesystem? With write access?

ivanjermakov• 6 months ago

Yes, yes, no.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Transferring_data

WhyNotHugo2• 6 months ago

Yes, yes, and yes.

https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2024/12/22/exporting-photos-fr...

bicepjai3• 6 months ago

Thanks for this project. Our family generates about 2TB of media a year, and it’s been like that for a while, so we’re sitting at roughly 12TB total. That’s very much the long tail of personal media.

I’m not ready to pay $60/month, but I do like iCloud’s memories and other photo features. My compromise is simple:

- I use docker-icloudpd to download our iCloud Photos to local storage over time. It’s been the most practical way I’ve found to back up multiple accounts into one place, though it does require occasional re-auth every so often. - I keep only the last ~2 years of media in iCloud and delete older ones after they’re archived locally. - For browsing and searching the older archive, I use Immich, which has been a great self-hosted personal photo cloud experience with a modern app feel.

For storage, I’ve found fast local disk matters a lot once you’re digging up photos from 5+ years ago. Something like an OWC 4M2 with M.2 drives keeps the experience snappy; a typical HDD-based NAS can feel sluggish when you just want to quickly pull up an old memory.

https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd

stavros2• 6 months ago

Does Photos have features you use that Immich doesn't? I've switched to the latter fully and love it (though I have an Android).

bicepjai3• 6 months ago

Music and AI features are still lagging in Immich, and I can understand why. Immich machine learning is not flushed out yet. If Immich has plans for creating marketplace for extensibility like plugins, in the current era of Claude code, I am sure we will end up with many options or features.

QuiEgo• 6 months ago

Encryption at rest. If someone breaks into my house and steals my server I'd rather they not be able to get data. I can do LUKS but I really want the data to only ever be decrypted client side.

nicbou2• 6 months ago

How much work is it to maintain an Immich instance? I'm trying to keep my digital setup lean, but I can't find a simple way to get photos off my iPhone and onto my home server. One way synchronization is my only goal. Extra features are not desired.

quietsegfault• 6 months ago

Disable Advanced Data Protection

Nope, bzzzzt, wrong!

CamperBob22• 6 months ago

That's E2E encryption, right? Wouldn't you just end up with a lot of unreadable files if you didn't turn it off before running this downloader?

nik_0_02• 6 months ago

This is awesome! This might be a great replacement to attempting to get the Windows app to work. Has anyone had luck with the iCloud app on windows?

Similar to some other folks in this thread I have ~2TB of iCloud data, a Macbook with far less than 2TB of space, an external hard drive somewhere with the external Photo Library that I need to plug in if I want to look at photos on the Macbook, and a Windows desktop with 10TB+ of rusty disks.

I was excited when they added the iCloud app + iCloud photos to Windows, but it never seems to catch up or finish what it is doing. It appears to be almost constantly download at 50MB/s, stressing both disk & internet, and yet navigating to the folder reveals that they are all 'available when online'.

It seems like there is not an option in Windows to actually grab everything in full quality (actually now that I look at it - its gotten to 944GB on disk / 1.91TB total, so it is getting there.)

I guess a real question - with these photos finally on a Windows desktop - is there a better photo browser than Microsoft photos that can show the HEIC and the Live Photo?

lkmill• 6 months ago

immich (self hosted photos app, https://immich.app/) "stacks" live photos with their videos

crossroadsguy• 6 months ago

I used to use the Photos desktop app to move my photos (“select from the app and drop into a folder somewhere” worked best) to a separate folder a lot (and regularly) until I started using ente. Now ente not only backs up to their e2ee cloud but its desktop app keeps those media synced to the OS of my choice on my laptop.

But I can still not escape Apple’s gonorrhoeic naming and organisation.

Pro: FOSS of course; it works, with limitations (that’s mostly Apple) and glitches (that’s entirely ente)

Cons: really subpar non-native apps (desktop app is quite a dumb app as well) :( (and barely and useful additional features that lets a user do some batch/organisational changes or so)

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it.

One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up flattening or partially reconstructing that on restore.

The approach I took was to treat Photos as the source of truth and verify restored items against it, rather than assuming filesystem metadata is enough. As far as I know, this is the only tool that restores albums and correctly round-trips all Photos item types while preserving location data, creation dates, and modification dates when restoring back into Photos.

Project page is here if it’s useful: https://photosbackup.app/

Happy to explain details if anyone’s curious — there are a lot of sharp edges in Photos once you go beyond “export originals”.

SSLy• 6 months ago

have you looked at parachute backup? they also boast ability to backup the more mercurial types of iPhotos data.

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

Backing up “mercurial” Photos data is only half the problem. The tricky part is restoring it in a way Photos actually recognizes as equivalent to the original library state. Photos Backup Anywhere restore works by re-importing items while explicitly reapplying Photos-level attributes: paired assets for Live Photos, burst membership and picks, slo-mo metadata, edits, locations, adjusted capture dates, and then reconstructing albums after the items exist again in the library.

In other words, the filesystem copy isn’t treated as the source of truth. The restore verifies items against what was backed up and only then rebuilds higher-level structure like albums. That’s the piece I didn’t see addressed elsewhere, and what originally motivated me to build it.

toomuchtodo• 6 months ago

Thanks for commenting, do you support S3 compatible targets? Backblaze B2, for example.

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

Not directly, no. If you can mount the S3 target as a drive, it can be used as a backup destination.

open_3• 6 months ago

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?

giancarlostoro3• 6 months ago

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.

zerkten2• 6 months ago

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.

m4632• 6 months ago

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.

thw_9a83c3• 6 months ago

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

giancarlostoro3• 6 months ago

I have taken time to slowly extract photos from old androids and its such a nightmare, and if you cant get a meaningful interface to load you have to resort to tooling that scrapes the whole drive and hope it grabs everything.

s4mbh4• 6 months ago

My current workflow for this is to install the 'simpleSSHD' app on the android phone and rsync the files off at full network speed.

The sshd running on the phone also supports key based auth , so it's pretty simple to automate.

snorlax100• 6 months ago

Love this app! Kudos

supermatt• 6 months ago

Is the app bound to the purchasers iCloud, or can I also use it to download my partners images?

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

Yes — Photos Backup Anywhere supports Apple Family Sharing

If the app is shared via Family Sharing, each family member can install and use it on their own Mac with their own iCloud Photos library. The app works with whichever Photos library is signed into macOS on that machine, so you can absolutely use it to back up your partner’s images as well.

wappieslurkz4• 6 months ago

Thanks for creating this amazing tool. A requirement for it to work is disabling "Advanced Data Protection". What are the implications of doing this?

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

That’s a good question. To be completely honest, I don’t know much about Advanced Data Protection myself, and I didn’t do anything specific in the app to detect or interact with it.

I’m actually curious: how did you discover that it doesn’t work when Advanced Data Protection is enabled? Was it through an error message, incomplete backups, or something else you noticed?

BeastMachine• 6 months ago

Pretty severe -- ADP allows users to store data with e2e encryption.

Disabling ADP is a pretty serious* thing to do -- and pretty disappointing since I was interested in the product. Since it's OSS though this might be something that can be worked around in the future.

torarnv2• 6 months ago

Awesome! Thanks for posting, I've been looking for exactly this kind of project that takes end to end pristine restoration seriously.

The FAQ states you back up the originals as plain images files in YYYY/MM/DD format, which is great for integration with other tools. What about metadata? Is it in a format that lends to integration with other tools, say if you stop developing/supporting your app for some reason?

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

Metadata is stored in an SQLite database alongside the backed up files. The format is not documented, but should be self explanatory if you examine the schema.

hackeman3002• 6 months ago

If you manually edit the date on a photo, is that also stored separately from the image file itself? Wondering because I've noticed photos I've backed up to Immich from iOS photos don't respect that edited date and reflect whatever the original date was.

I've been thinking about looking into a fix for this since it's bugged me a bit.

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

Yes — in Apple Photos the manually edited date/time is not written back into the image or video file. It’s stored separately in the Photos library database, which is why tools like Immich usually fall back to the original capture date in EXIF / QuickTime metadata.

Photos Backup Anywhere does handle this case: it reads the adjusted date from the Photos library and stores that modified timestamp in its own SQLite database, linked to the backed-up file, so the edited date isn’t lost even though the file itself isn’t rewritten.

ubermonkey2• 6 months ago

I'm extremely interested in any process that would allow me to create file-system-level backups of individual photos. Will your tool do that?

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

Yes — that’s exactly what Photos Backup Anywhere is designed to do.

The app creates file-system-level backups of each individual photo and video from your Photos library. Every asset is exported as a real file on disk (HEIC, JPEG, MOV, etc.), not a database blob or package, so you can browse, copy, verify, and back them up with standard tools.

In addition, the app keeps a small SQLite database alongside the files to track metadata (including edits, albums, and relationships like Live Photos), which allows accurate restores and verification while still giving you transparent, plain-files access to your media.

scoot2• 6 months ago

This looks interesting. Can I use it to back up photos from one (old) photo library, and restore them into another (newer) one?

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

Yes — that’s exactly what it’s designed for. You can back up photos from one Photos library and later restore them into a different Photos library. The restore process recreates the items in the target library using the data stored in the backup.

darkteflon2• 6 months ago

This is a great app! Thanks, I bought it. I'm backing up to a network share over SMB. Just wanted to let you know that the error message in the event that the share becomes unmounted during a backup is a bit obscure: it just says "pdb.sqlite" doesn't exist. Stopping and restarting the backup fixes it. Might be helpful to provide some clearer error handling / messaging and guidance for disappearing network shares?

gerdemb10• 6 months ago

Thanks or the detailed feedback.

You’re right about that error message. What’s happening is that when the SMB share gets unmounted, the app can no longer access its SQLite database (pba.sqlite), and the resulting error isn’t very user-friendly. I agree it would be much clearer to explicitly detect a missing or unmounted network share and provide guidance.

I’ve added this to my list of things to improve. Thanks again for taking the time to report it — feedback like this is super helpful.

bunnyfoofoo• 6 months ago

Hey @gerdemb, just wanted to say thank you. Bought this because of your comment and this worked perfectly for backing up my 1TB photo library.

rhettbull2• 6 months ago

As far as I know, this is the only tool that restores albums and correctly round-trips all Photos item types while preserving location data, creation dates, and modification dates when restoring back into Photos.

My free open source tool osxphotos [1] does this. In addition to an "osxphotos export" command to create archival exports with all metadata, it also has an "osxphotos import" command that can restore all metadata including albums (with exception of named persons/face regions, though persons can be converted into keywords on import). It can also read XMP sidecar files to restore metadata from those. It's a CLI and definitely a power user tool.

It also includes an "osxphotos sync" command that can sync metadata between two libraries. Some people use this to sync metadata like favorites from iPhone library to the Mac library. (can't go the other way unfortunately)

[1] https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

allarm• 6 months ago

I use your tool to backup my photo library, it's been working great! Thank you so much for this amazing piece of software.

rykc2• 6 months ago

Wish I’d seen this 3 days ago. Needed to backup our Shared Library and did the following (about 10K photos/videos at 300gb, had enough space so full downloaded to MacBook, not optimize. 1. Repair iPhoto library, (Wait 24 hrs to re-sync to iCloud) - initially looks like it moved all photos to personal. 2. Select small chunks, by year worked well enough - selecting All gave me the spinning ball. Then export unmodified to external hdd into folders organized by year. 3. Moved entire photo library file to another external hdd. 4. Open iPhoto and select external hdd library as primary library, let it re-sync to iCloud (Wait 24 hrs). iPhoto now running off external HDD library and I’ll backup to separate external HDD monthly. Repair function and wired Ethernet connection were biggest game changers to previous attempts.

nathancahill• 6 months ago

Is there any difference in moving Photos Library.photoslibrary to an external HDD and then pointing Photos.app at that?

rykc2• 6 months ago

Not in my experience, previously ran it setup externally with a shared library for at least a year or longer, https://support.apple.com/en-ca/108345. Typically I backup to external drive 2 ways, copy of library itself and unmodified export, only had to go through above after I needed to rebuild the laptop. OP app and or https://photosbackup.app/ , seems like they might enhance my setup, will have to take a closer look.

jaffa22• 6 months ago

There's some technical reason (or non-reason) why Mac OS does not accept the System photolibrary on an external disk. It prevents certain things from happening which may or may not mater to you. Otherwise you can switch librarys by holding Option during photo bootup.

d1l• 6 months ago

Fuck, my wife got a notice that she would have to increase her iCloud storage so last week began the process of ordering a backup of all her pictures so I could get them off iCloud and organized on some drives at home. We got 12 zips of the pictures along with csv's and some metadata, and I literally just finished iterating on the script to sort them into year-based folders and convert all the HEIC shit into JPG. It's running literally right now.

Guess I should've searched harder!

aebot• 6 months ago

Ok https://aionlywebsite.pythonanywhere.com/

monksy• 6 months ago

If you are already in the progress of downloading all of your photos, this is a great time to consider completely switching over to Immich.

It's great!

slimebot80• 6 months ago

iCloud Photos.app seems to not be able to show some photos

But Photometor.app (owned by Apple) can...

So that's a little annoying... I wish I had more visibility on photos not showing up in Photos.app, and what it is that stops it showing them

whatever1• 6 months ago

Why did Apple invent this abomination of a system for storing photos?

We have had file systems for decades. They work well. They sync trivially.

bobbylarrybobby• 6 months ago

If I'm not mistaken, the Photos app stores originals on disk and then uses a sqlite database to track metadata (and maybe edits to photos as well, given that it has the originals). Seems reasonable to me.

mvkel2• 6 months ago

Incredible. I have such a hacked-together system to get my iCloud Photos backed up to an external drive while not filling my main laptop drive. This would be even better.

mvkel2• 6 months ago

Related: does anyone know of a way to delete the original videos on trimmed ones? Apparently all edits to videos are non-destructive, so the 10-minute video that I trimmed to 2 seconds still takes up 8gb.

reader9274• 6 months ago

Yeah, choose "Save Video as New Clip" and then delete the original.

akssri• 6 months ago

For those of you on Android / PC-Mac - Syncthing is an excellent tool for P2P syncing between multiple devices (it works over NAT and IPV6 too!).

jasonkester2• 6 months ago

I was there until I saw this feature:

Automatic de-duplication of photos with the same name

I recently went through a year’s worth of photos from my wife’s phone, and found three distinct “img_0001.jpg”’s just in that single year. Apple’s naming convention is so short sighted that I’d be terrified letting a piece of software try to dedupe it “by name “

j16sdiz3• 6 months ago

... Apple’s naming convention.

No, it is not. It came from DCF standard that predates smart phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_sy...

j16sdiz3• 6 months ago

The 4 digits numbers are, of cause, came from the 8.3 file name length constraint. Gonna love CP/M.

jasonkester2• 6 months ago

Replying to myself to tell me that I'm wrong.

I'm running this on my icloud photos now, and it seems to be dropping them nicely into folders by year and month:

D:\Pictures\icpd\2026\01\01

... so my wife will need to step up her game and start taking 10,000 photos a month before I run afoul of this.

cleanexit0• 6 months ago

This looks useful. I ran into a very similar problem recently and ended up building a small tool for my own use: https://github.com/cleanexit0/darwin-photos

It's macOS-only and intentionally minimal — the goal is just to download originals from iCloud Photos to disk without syncing everything into Photos.app first.

To be clear on limitations: it doesn't preserve albums or other metadata yet, and it's not meant to replace more full-featured tools. It’s mainly for the "I just want my photos off iCloud for backup" case.

Reading the comments here, it sounds like metadata preservation is a big pain point for many people — I'd be curious whether that's the first thing folks would want added, or if simple bulk export already covers most needs.

Razengan• 6 months ago

It's fucking amazing sometimes how the Mac/iOS Photos app can't download a photo or small video for several minutes but you can easily watch YouTube on the same connection.

And it took Apple YEARS to give us a "Keep Downloaded" option for iCloud Drive documents in Finder.

And it's been years since I read any ebooks because the damn Mac/iOS Books app keeps removing my downloaded books even though I have several GBs of storage space left.

Goddamn Tim Cook and the other execs, do they even ever use their own products at all?

nathan_f77• 6 months ago

Nice to see my project on Hacker News! I started this almost 10 years ago and haven't been involved with maintenance for a long time, but I'm glad that people are still finding it useful.

thw_9a83c3• 6 months ago

From the project describtion: "Looking for MAINTAINER for this project"

Honestly, Apple should officially maintain tools like this. However, for obvious reasons, such as the iCloud subscription revenue model, Apple will not do it. In fact, Apple may even make life harder for such tools.

xattt• 6 months ago

I’m in the midst of a backup-to-local project and, with this post to HN, I’m worried an Apple project manager will be on a mission this morning to get his team to cripple this software.

blindriver• 6 months ago

Is there no worry in giving the app your password? I would never just give my password, especially my Apple account password to a random app. Is this program reliable? However it looks like a program that I want to use.

brianzelip• 6 months ago

Anyone got any tips for programmatically downloading photos in a shared album?

realityfactchex• 6 months ago

It is no fun to have old iCloud photos deleted unexpectedly. Apple has provided plenty of footguns, even if they really are user errors. For examples: (1) during device restores and (2) premium subscription management fumbles.

Product idea: Apple should offer a paid service to restore the "old backups" of photos that are no longer accessible via iCloud UI/API, which were soft-removed for missing the subscription quota or whatever, if Apple happens to have that data tucked away in cold storage somewhere.

Case in point, I had some c. 2016 era photos in iMessages that I thought I handled right to not lose from iCloud, but they are apparently nowhere to be found in iCloud API based on recent checks. More than mildly irritating.

I should have used an iCloud photos backup tool like this much sooner.

Print what you want to keep onto archival paper with archival dyes. Everything else will atrophy.

iCloud Photos Downloader

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