rclone VS icloud_photos_downloader

rclone: a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage.

Synchronise buckets with Sclone or Rclone

Says that Apple doesn't provide a multi platform API. It doesn't provide any official supported way to access iCloud from Windows, Linux.

There's a ticket covering everything you might ever want to know:

https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/1778

seconding rsync and syncthing.

the server could expose an smb or nfs share, the client could mount it, and then sync to that mount.

rsync over ssh also works, if you do not want to run smb/nfs.

this is also a cool tool https://rclone.org/

rclone [1] to dropbox. works since years without problems

[1] https://rclone.org/

rclone provides a special pCloud config option, which makes the setup straight forward. rclone can encrypt the data it uploads with its own encryption but not with the pCloud encryption. Therefore it can only upload data to the unencrypted pCloud folders, not to the Crypto Folder.

The arkclone project impliments rclone in ArkOS to achieve cloud saves. Not yet built in to ArkOS yet, and not a lot of recent traction on the pull request to get it added, but it can be installed manually.

> 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…