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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.