icloud_photos_downloader VS gphotos-sync

> 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…

Sadly, it’s not configurable. It’s just an inherent limitation of the API (1). Takeout is the best alternative, but for something more realtime you can use tools (2) that wrap the browser UI which also exports full quality.

(1) https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync#warning-google-api...

(2) https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync

What I did was a very painful process of using Google Takeout and gphotos-sync ( https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync ), manually merging what I knew was missing, and using file counts by month/year to track other missing objects. gphotos-sync is limited by the same API issues as rclone, which is another perfectly fine utility to use, besides the API limitations. On a side note, I use rclone to backup everything to "storj" every night ( delta sync ).

Of course you can do the same perodically or use https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

I haven't tried immich yet, but I am using https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync with great success. I wonder how hard it would be to set up a workflow to get the synced photos into immich.

https://developers.google.com/photos/library/reference/rest/v1/mediaItems/list or https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

I pull mine from Google Photos, with a docker image running a tool: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

Its not perfect, but as a backup, it works well.