Cryptomator VS icloud_photos_downloader

the best way to do this is with https://cryptomator.org

Before putting anything on a cloud service I would recommend 3rd party tools, like Cryptomator, to encrypt folders and such, then upload to a cloud service.

I use Cryptomator - https://cryptomator.org

I've used countless encryption "schemes" over the years, from True/Vera-Crypt to encrypted sparse bundles/images, and none have ever really felt right.

These days i tend to use Cryptomator[0] instead. It accomplishes what none of the others could do, which is transparent encryption across devices.

With Cryptomator, i simply create a vault somewhere in the cloud, stuff data in it, and i can access it from my laptop, phone or tablet, and not think much about it. It integrates into the normal file browsing APIs, and doesn't get in the way.

Because it does "per file" encryption, it also doesn't need to download a 20-100MB chunk from the cloud before decrypting, so it's rather fast (depending on file size of course).

[0]: https://cryptomator.org/

Cryptomator's arguably the most popular encryption software for cloud storage (you can give yourself zero-knowledge encryption by using them) - it's actually what they specialize & focus on (cloud encryption). It's 100% open source and Free to use on computers. On phones I believe it's just a 1-time fee of a few bucks ($13-14, then you have it forever) - note: their iOS offering is still new, so may be a bit unpolished at the moment.

This is the solution: https://cryptomator.org/

Cryptomator. It is made for uploading files securely to cloud storage, but works locally, is easy to use, and completely free for your use case.

> They don't offer an appropriate API to get photos out.

There's this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit "The framework provides access to photos on the person’s device and in iCloud."

If you want to use undocumented APIs on non-Apple devices directly, there are projects like https://github.com/steilerDev/icloud-photos-sync and https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... that appear to be able to do this.

If you have iCloud, you can use icloud.com to get all your photos in a zip.

Or you can use scripts like this one : https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

I use https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... running on my NAS to regularly download photos from my wife's iCloud account. The photos are stored in full resolution on iCloud with the EXIF data, unlike Google Photos, so that's nice. The only annoyance is that you need to reauthorize the tool every three months. But it sends you a reminder when the time is coming up.

I keep my photos in iCloud and sync them up to a Synology NAS (using icloudpd) which is backed up to Backblaze B2.

Direct project link https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader

I was able to download 2 x 2TB (4TB) icloud photos accounts using this in 2 days if you are comfortable with the command line https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader There’s no other solution the mac app was very slow and was gonna takes weeks for me but this app downloaded everything in 2 days

A set of PowerShell scripts to download and organize iCloud media. The scripts use the awesome iCloud downloader from https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader to do the actual download. And the organization happens in a specific way…