iCloud Photos Downloader

HN disclosure: I’m the author of Photos Backup Anywhere, but this thread mirrors the exact issues that pushed me to write it.

One thing that surprised me when digging into Apple Photos is how much state isn’t represented by just files-on-disk. Albums, Live Photos (paired assets), bursts, slo-mo, edits, and even “simple” things like adjusted capture dates are all tracked separately, and most export/backup tools end up flattening or partially reconstructing that on restore.

The approach I took was to treat Photos as the source of truth and verify restored items against it, rather than assuming filesystem metadata is enough. As far as I know, this is the only tool that restores albums and correctly round-trips all Photos item types while preserving location data, creation dates, and modification dates when restoring back into Photos.

Project page is here if it’s useful: https://photosbackup.app/

Happy to explain details if anyone’s curious — there are a lot of sharp edges in Photos once you go beyond “export originals”.

This is awesome! This might be a great replacement to attempting to get the Windows app to work. Has anyone had luck with the iCloud app on windows?

Similar to some other folks in this thread I have ~2TB of iCloud data, a Macbook with far less than 2TB of space, an external hard drive somewhere with the external Photo Library that I need to plug in if I want to look at photos on the Macbook, and a Windows desktop with 10TB+ of rusty disks.

I was excited when they added the iCloud app + iCloud photos to Windows, but it never seems to catch up or finish what it is doing. It appears to be almost constantly download at 50MB/s, stressing both disk & internet, and yet navigating to the folder reveals that they are all 'available when online'.

It seems like there is not an option in Windows to actually grab everything in full quality (actually now that I look at it - its gotten to 944GB on disk / 1.91TB total, so it is getting there.)

I guess a real question - with these photos finally on a Windows desktop - is there a better photo browser than Microsoft photos that can show the HEIC and the Live Photo?

Wish I’d seen this 3 days ago. Needed to backup our Shared Library and did the following (about 10K photos/videos at 300gb, had enough space so full downloaded to MacBook, not optimize. 1. Repair iPhoto library, (Wait 24 hrs to re-sync to iCloud) - initially looks like it moved all photos to personal. 2. Select small chunks, by year worked well enough - selecting All gave me the spinning ball. Then export unmodified to external hdd into folders organized by year. 3. Moved entire photo library file to another external hdd. 4. Open iPhoto and select external hdd library as primary library, let it re-sync to iCloud (Wait 24 hrs). iPhoto now running off external HDD library and I’ll backup to separate external HDD monthly. Repair function and wired Ethernet connection were biggest game changers to previous attempts.

While not free, and not for any other platform than macOS. The program Parachute[1] in the App Store is very nice in downloading both photos from your library as well as files from the various locations.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?...

Surprisingly, there is no official way to download all (400 Gb) photos from iCloud. Here is an open-source command-line tool to download all your iCloud photos.

I’ve been using usbmuxd+ifuse to copy the photo files straight from the phone. No need to wait for an upload/download to some remote server, just a direct cable from the phone to my computer. I get the original files, and can even move (instead of copy) to clear up the phone.

Ok https://aionlywebsite.pythonanywhere.com/

Thanks for this project. Our family generates about 2TB of media a year, and it’s been like that for a while, so we’re sitting at roughly 12TB total. That’s very much the long tail of personal media.

I’m not ready to pay $60/month, but I do like iCloud’s memories and other photo features. My compromise is simple:

- I use docker-icloudpd to download our iCloud Photos to local storage over time. It’s been the most practical way I’ve found to back up multiple accounts into one place, though it does require occasional re-auth every so often. - I keep only the last ~2 years of media in iCloud and delete older ones after they’re archived locally. - For browsing and searching the older archive, I use Immich, which has been a great self-hosted personal photo cloud experience with a modern app feel.

For storage, I’ve found fast local disk matters a lot once you’re digging up photos from 5+ years ago. Something like an OWC 4M2 with M.2 drives keeps the experience snappy; a typical HDD-based NAS can feel sluggish when you just want to quickly pull up an old memory.

https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd

I run this periodically from a little shell script; I "should" automate it, but time is scarce.

  ⟩ cat ~/bin/icloud_download
  #!/bin/bash
  mkdir "$(pwd)"/{photos,cookies} 2> /dev/null
  
  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" ]]; then
      echo "need env ICLOUD_USERNAME"
      exit 1
  fi
  if [[ -z "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" ]]; then
      echo "need env ICLOUD_PASSWORD"
      exit 1
  fi
  
  podman container run -it --rm --name icloud \
      -v $(pwd)/photos:/data \
      -v $(pwd)/cookies:/cookies \
      -e TZ=America/Boise \
      icloudpd/icloudpd:latest \
      icloudpd --directory /data \
      --cookie-directory /cookies \
      --folder-structure {:%Y/%Y-%m-%d} \
      --username "${ICLOUD_USERNAME}" \
      --password "${ICLOUD_PASSWORD}" \
      --size original

I was just thinking about this today. Apples lack of any 3rd party integration for things like this and iMessage is really annoying sometimes. In addition to a secondary backup, I’d love to automatically sync some photos from a certain album to my parents photo frame. Or if I take a nice nature shot have it sync to a Samsung frame tv. I get the benefits of the walled garden but esp w photos and messaging it seems like opening up a little would allow for some innovation

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)

My concern with backing up iCloud Photos with anything but Apple Photos is that there are some proprietary formats like Live Photos and slow mo video for which exports are lossy. Also, Apple Photos stores all edits non-destructively, so 'flattening' the edits into a single file for export is also a lossy operation.

It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.

Parachute Backup is a tool I use: https://parachuteapps.com/parachute

Does anyone have any idea for why Apple makes it so difficult to keep photos downloaded?

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

I'm a big fan of Parachute Backup for this purpose. https://parachuteapps.com/parachute

This great. I want to switch to android but the only thing stopping me is eight years of photos. No more.

All my vertical videos in iCloud show up cropped horizontal for some reason. If I go to edit I see the whole video. I really do not want to trust any cloud provider to maintain my years of archives of family photos and videos. Glad things like this exist. I just need properly date-foldered files, without no duplciates. Is that so hard?

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.

Fuck, my wife got a notice that she would have to increase her iCloud storage so last week began the process of ordering a backup of all her pictures so I could get them off iCloud and organized on some drives at home. We got 12 zips of the pictures along with csv's and some metadata, and I literally just finished iterating on the script to sort them into year-based folders and convert all the HEIC shit into JPG. It's running literally right now.

Guess I should've searched harder!

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

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.

Is there an iCloud Photos uploader?

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.

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

You know you only need to do a GDPR request to Apple (dedicated page), select images and you get a download link after a few hours

I mean can't you go to privacy.apple.com, ask for an archive of your data, and then they'll email you the link to a zip file in a week or two? I'm pretty sure this is what my girlfriend did when she transitioned from an iPhone to a Pixel. I think there's even a specific checkbox for photos/videos

There is something similar to Google Takeout for Apple Photos. Recently used it to download thousands of photos.

I pay around 10 euros a month to apple just so I can sync my photos from iphone to mac and ipad. That’s the only reason I need the 2 TB for icloud service. With an app like this I could download and keep copies and get rid of iCloud subscription?

I created this over the holiday break to do mostly the same:

https://github.com/rcarmo/PhotosExport

...when you try to export files using the (restricted) APIs we get, it automatically triggers a download.

why not use rclone

Became more fascinated with the history of my small hometown (Paris, Texas) TLDR: Much of it was wiped out by a 1916 fire. I spent some time recently vibe-coding this interactive map to provide some kind of historic visualization ( which enabled me to see the impact better ) https://gorch.com/parisfiremap/

Vulnerability hijack incoming with the headline calling for another maintainer

Thanks. I cannot get iCloud sync to work at all. It consumes CPU, asks for logins repeatedly, etc but fails to actually do its job. When I think of its bugs and all the issues with the latest iOS (bugs and performance on recent hardware), I am thinking of exiting the Apple ecosystem entirely.

> Disable Advanced Data Protection

Nope, bzzzzt, wrong!

You need an extra tool to download your own photos? That's... not a basic feature?

I'm always surprised what kind of antifeatures people in Apple land are willing to accept and still use those things...