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”.

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?

  ⟩ 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

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

Automatic de-duplication of photos with the same name

I recently went through a year’s worth of photos from my wife’s phone, and found three distinct “img_0001.jpg”’s just in that single year. Apple’s naming convention is so short sighted that I’d be terrified letting a piece of software try to dedupe it “by name “

Honestly, Apple should officially maintain tools like this. However, for obvious reasons, such as the iCloud subscription revenue model, Apple will not do it. In fact, Apple may even make life harder for such tools.

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

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

Product idea: Apple should offer a paid service to restore the "old backups" of photos that are no longer accessible via iCloud UI/API, which were soft-removed for missing the subscription quota or whatever, if Apple happens to have that data tucked away in cold storage somewhere.

Case in point, I had some c. 2016 era photos in iMessages that I thought I handled right to not lose from iCloud, but they are apparently nowhere to be found in iCloud API based on recent checks. More than mildly irritating.

I should have used an iCloud photos backup tool like this much sooner.

Print what you want to keep onto archival paper with archival dyes. Everything else will atrophy.

It's macOS-only and intentionally minimal — the goal is just to download originals from iCloud Photos to disk without syncing everything into Photos.app first.

To be clear on limitations: it doesn't preserve albums or other metadata yet, and it's not meant to replace more full-featured tools. It’s mainly for the "I just want my photos off iCloud for backup" case.

Reading the comments here, it sounds like metadata preservation is a big pain point for many people — I'd be curious whether that's the first thing folks would want added, or if simple bulk export already covers most needs.

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

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 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.

It's great!

We have had file systems for decades. They work well. They sync trivially.

But Photometor.app (owned by Apple) can...

So that's a little annoying... I wish I had more visibility on photos not showing up in Photos.app, and what it is that stops it showing them

And it took Apple YEARS to give us a "Keep Downloaded" option for iCloud Drive documents in Finder.

And it's been years since I read any ebooks because the damn Mac/iOS Books app keeps removing my downloaded books even though I have several GBs of storage space left.

Goddamn Tim Cook and the other execs, do they even ever use their own products at all?

Guess I should've searched harder!

https://github.com/rcarmo/PhotosExport

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

Nope, bzzzzt, wrong!

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