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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!).

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.

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

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