iCloud Digital Declutter
[Read & summarized below] How to back up an iCloud Photo Library offline on Windows
mythofechelon.co.uk : https://mythofechelon.co.uk/blog/2023/04/12/how-to-backup-an-icloud-photo-library-offline-on-windows
Apr 12, 2023 — Existing guides. Bad solution: iCloud for Windows. Workable solution: Data & Privacy export. Good solution: iCloud Photos Downloader.
[Read & summarized below] How to Back Up and Organize Photos From Your iPhone or …
PCMag: https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-back-up-and-organize-photos-from-your-iphone-or-ipad
Jun 17, 2019 — Option 2 is effectively the same as Option 1, only using a different online service. So, instead of using iCloud, we’ll discuss other file …
iCloud Photos backup solutions limitations
9to5Mac: https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/26/icloud-photos-backups-are-discouraged-by-design-and-thats-a-dangerous-problem-for-users/
Jun 26, 2022 — My best advice for iPhone and iPad users who want a separate copy of their photo library outside of iCloud Photos is this: you can request a …
Move Thousands of Photos from OneDrive to iCloud?
Microsoft Community: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/move-thousands-of-photos-from-onedrive-to-icloud/1ec0b08c-71ae-4f32-b820-fea872b177c6
Mar 19, 2021 — To select multiple photos or videos in OneDrive for iOS, follow the steps below: Press and hold one photo or video, then tap the circle next …
PCMag
Get Organized – How to Back Up and Organize Your iPhone Photos
– share digital photo albums so that many people have access to them
– before sharing:
> make sure all the photos
>– were saved to the same location and
>– were clearly labeled.
Thoroughly organize collection
– getting images off iPhone,
– saving them to file-syncing and storage service
– making sure they were clearly labeled
– put off the task for a few weeks
– notifications
– a photo cleanup project,
– first step: to deal with the pictures on my iPhone.
Option 1: Use iCloud
If you use iCloud as the main place where you store photos, all you really need to do is make sure your iCloud account is backing up and syncing your data.
Option 2: Use a Backup and Syncing Service
Option 2 is effectively the same as Option 1, only using a different online service. So, instead of using iCloud, we’ll discuss other file syncing and storage options, such as Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.
Choose a file-syncing and storage service, create an account, and download the service’s iOS app.
Sign in and look for a setting called something like Camera Upload, Automatic Upload, or Backup & Sync. This setting automatically uploads photos from your device to the service. Turn it on.
Once the setting is on and your images have been backed up, you can delete them from your iPhone.
Option 3: Download Photos to a Computer and Back Up
uploading your photos and videos to a computer first and then
moving them to a backup and storage service
It’s the method I used, because
I like seeing my pictures on a larger computer and
deciding which ones to keep or throw away
before I move them to a backup service. It also
lets me make quick edits, such as cropping and color correction during the process.
Connect your phone to your computer with your Lightning-to-USB charging cable.
Note that while you can transfer images wirelessly with AirDrop, the cable is faster and gives you the option to delete the photos from your phone automatically once they move over to the computer.
Launch your preferred image-editing program.
If you’re a Mac user, the default here would be the Photos app that came with your Mac.
Windows includes a similar Photos app, and more-pro-minded photography buffs may want to use Adobe Lightroom on either platform.
Import the image.
Now that you have your photos in your image-editing program, you can easily see them and decide whether you want to delete or edit any.
The last step is to drag and drop the images into the backup solution of your choice, whether it’s Box, Flickr, IDrive, or something else.
An alternative to cloud storage is to use a local, cloud-connected storage device such as the Western Digital My Cloud or the SanDisk ibi.
Depending on what service you use and which utilities you’ve installed on the computer, you may find that a photo importer tool pops up automatically to help you bring photos from your phone to somewhere else. For example, if you’ve installed Google Drive’s Backup and Sync utility, that can be set to automatically save image files onto the cloud.
— below here is not yet read —
Get Organized Google Drive photos
Tips for Organizing Photos
Here are some tips for organizing your images, plus an important question to ask yourself about what kind of tools and services best meet your photo-storage needs.
Photo Hosting or More-General Cloud Storage?
When organizing photos, the biggest question to ask yourself may be whether to store and back them up using a general cloud storage service or a photo-specific hosting site.
There are several excellent photo hosting services, including Flickr, ImageShack, Lightroom and SmugMug. These types of services generally come with tools specific to organizing and finding images. For example, you arrange images into “albums” rather than folders and subfolders, and some services recommend albums automatically based on the date or location where you shot the pictures.
Photo-hosting services often have facial recognition, so the next time you need to search for photos of a particular person, you can find them quickly without having to remember where they are. And it’s not just faces: Flickr and others can detect and tag specific object types, such as tree, mountain, building, or dog, and show you all images that include those objects. You can also add your own identifying keyword tags for organization. Google Photos has some neat automatic suggestions for color correction and stitching together photos taken in quick succession to make a video that resembles stop-motion animation.
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Not everyone loves those features, however. If you have a brain that takes more easily to a system of folders and subfolders, a more general cloud storage solution is likely better. Another reason to use a more-general cloud storage service is if you already pay for one for your files, and you have extra room to spare for pictures.
Get Organized organize photos
Organize by Year and Event
When organizing photos, a system that works well for me is to create one folder (or album) for each year. I have folders called 2019 Photos, 2018 Photos, 2017 Photos, and so forth. With mine, I get to 2006 and then have a folder for everything from 2005 and earlier because I have so few digital pictures from that time that it doesn’t make sense to separate them all.
If you use iCloud, you get a lot of built-in organization options. You can view your images by date, location (on a map), or event (which Apple calls Moments). If you use Apple Photos (or the Windows 10 Photos app) you also get face and object recognition. Most photo software that handles importing also can automatically create folders based on year and date, as well as giving you file naming options.
Within the year folders, I use subfolders that are typically marked by an event or occasion, such as a trip, wedding, graduation, or holiday. Those are the details that I remember when I think about a photo I want to pull. When was it and what were we doing?
I like to rename my photos and put keywords into the file name. If it sounds like a job that’s too tedious, know that you can use a file-renaming tool to do it faster and more efficiently.
Delete Duplicates
A common problem people face when organizing photos is duplicates. It’s especially troublesome if you import images to your computer, rename the files, and then inadvertently import them a second time because your computer won’t spot them as duplicates if the file names are different.
Starting with iOS 13, Apple Photos can automatically remove duplicates. Meanwhile, the solution is to use a deduping tool. PCMag hasn’t tested any software in this category, but you’ll have no trouble finding a decent tool if you search online for “photo deduping tool.” Some software, such as ACDSee Pro or Lightroom, can avoid dupes if you check a checkbox at import labeled Ignore Duplicates or something similar.
mythofechelon.co.uk
mythofechelon
iCloud Photo Library
– is full of invaluable memories that I never want to lose
– lovely family events, amazing holidays, incredible concert moments, etc.
it’s always good to have a backup, ideally one that’s offline so you have complete control over it.
Bad solution: iCloud for Windows 🔗
Workable solution: Data & Privacy export 🔗
Sloww
Good solution: iCloud Photos Downloader 🔗
iCloud Photos Downloader – a free, open-source, third-party tool to… download iCloud photos, and it works remarkably well!
It is a Command-Line Interface (CLI) tool
Don’t be intimidated – it’s really not as difficult as it seems.
1. Download iCloud Photos Downloader 🔗
Browse to https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader/releases and download the latest file named something like icloudpd-<version>-windows-amd64.exe. For example, icloudpd-1.12.0-windows-amd64.exe.
(This is a CLI .exe file – you cannot simply double-click on it to run it properly like with “normal” ones.)
2. Open PowerShell 🔗
CLI apps can be run in any shell. We could use Command Prompt (old), but we’re going to use PowerShell (new) for future proofing.
To open it, click on the Start Menu in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, type / search for “powershell”, and click on “Windows PowerShell”.
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3. Run iCloud Photos Downloader initially 🔗
The following will run the initial full download.
3a. Prepare your command for your environment:
Template: & “<full path to the downloaded .EXE file>” –directory “<full path to the folder where you want to store your iCloud photos and videos>” –username <your iCloud / Apple ID username>
Example: & “C:\Users\Ben\Downloads\icloudpd-1.12.0-windows-amd64.exe” –directory “C:\Users\Ben\Pictures\iCloud Photos Backup” –username john@example.com
3b. In PowerShell, type in your command and press Enter to run it. (Screenshots are below in case you’re unsure what it’s meant to look like.)
3c. After a few seconds, it will prompt for you to enter in your iCloud / Apple ID password. Type or paste it in (you won’t see any characters appear) and press Enter.
3d. If you have Two- / Multi-Factor Authentication enabled (which I hope you do), type in the number for the option / method you want to use, press Enter, type in the code, and press Enter.
3e. The full download should have started.
Mine maxed out my Internet connection’s download speed of 300 Mbps / 37.5 MBps and completed the entire download in ~19.25 hours! And on top of that, it used more than half of the processing power while doing so!
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4. Run iCloud Photos Downloader subsequently 🔗
You probably don’t want to run a full download every single time you want to back up your iCloud Photo Library, so the following will run a subsequent / incremental download from the latest backwards until it finds matching local copies.
4a. Prepare your command for your environment:
Template: & “<full path to the downloaded .EXE file>” –directory “<full path to the folder where you want to store your iCloud photos and videos>” –username <your iCloud / Apple ID username> –until-found <number of photos in a row to consider as up to date>
Example: & “C:\Users\Ben\Downloads\icloudpd-1.12.0-windows-amd64.exe” –directory “C:\Users\Ben\Pictures\iCloud Photos Backup” –username john@example.com –until-found 20
4b. In PowerShell, type in your command and press Enter to run it.
4c. After a few seconds, it will prompt for you to enter in your iCloud / Apple ID password. Type or paste it in (you won’t see any characters appear) and press Enter.
4d. If you have Two- / Multi-Factor Authentication enabled (which I hope you do), you may need to complete this depending on when you last ran it: type in the number for the option / method you want to use, press Enter, type in the code, and press Enter.
4e. The incremental download should have started.
Long read: https://willem.com/blog/2020-08-31_free-from-the-icloud-escaping-apple-photos/
willem.com
for something as valuable as my personal memories, I want to be in full control.
migrated photo library away from the iCloud, using free, open source software.
Eventually Apple greatly improved the Photos app, but its focus was no longer to be a digital hub that you control (like the Mac with iPhoto). Instead, Apple Photos is designed to be a service that fully controls your photos. I guess this is convenient for those folks that don’t want to be bothered with managing their own stuff. While Apple Photos still allows you to keep a local, offline, photo library, you’ll be getting a limited experience (riddled with bugs). Therefore the best way to use Apple Photos is by enabling the so called ‘iCloud Photo Library’.
iPhoto : previous way
Apple Photos : fully control your photos
– still allows you to keep a local, offline, photo library
Adobe: an update to their popular Lightroom app caused photos to disappear forever! Whatever cloud you’re using: always make a backup yourself!
Managing photos with free software
freedom of speech
take control over your data, like your photos.
Free options:
Shotwell : an app
– very much like the original Apple iPhoto
– allows you to organise your photos in events, group them by month and year.
– better than Apple Photos: offers you much more control over photo files
– works with all the popular photo file formats, including RAW.
Darktable: an app
– enables you to develop RAW photo files, manage them and view them through a zoom able light table.
GIMP: an image manipulation program
– to retouch and edit individual photos. It is very powerful and offers many advanced features.
GNOME Photos: an application
– allows you to manage your photos in a simple manner.
– the default photo application in the popular GNOME desktop environment that you’ll find in many GNU/Linux distributions
digiKam: an advanced photo management application
– offers many different options to import, manage, edit and export your photos
– been the default photo app on the popular KDE desktop environment.
Prerequisite: clean your library!
organize photos, clean them
– take the time to go through all photos and remove duplicates, bad or unnecessary.
MacBook
iPhoto: aggressively filter photos
– removed many (near) duplicates, fuzzy ones and obvious meaningless photos
– going through my photos a few hours per day for two weeks!
– reduced the number of photos by approximately 50%!
Apple Photos
runs better on modern Apple computers, like my powerful iMac
– can export the original masters all at once
– Select (all) your photos and choose “File” > “Export unmodified originals”
– Use sequential filenames with a manually set prefix
– Do batch renaming using EXIF creation dates in a later step
Update all the individual filenames to a more meaningful something
a photo file with the date + time would be best.
YYYYMMDD-HH-MM template
GNU/Linux: terminal programs to do this
Using EXIF information to rename the photos to include the date and time the photo was taken
I used the exiftool available on GNU/Linux to do this, the exact command I used was: exiftool -d ‘%Y%m%d-%H%M%%-03.c.%%e’ ‘-filenameCreateDate’. I ran this command on a powerful server that could go through the thousands of photos more quickly than my tablet.
Batch converting HEIC to JPG
– the modern HEIC image format (used by iPhones) is superior to JPG in terms of compression and image quality,
– it lacks support in many popular free software solutions
– Support for HEIC is growing, but I wanted things to work well now
The easiest thing to do was to convert all my HEIC photos to JPG.
To do this I used the ‘mogrify’ command that is part of the popular ‘imagemagick’ suite of tools available on pretty much any platform.
As my photos where copied to a (powerful) server, I took advantage of the server’s computing power by running the conversion there. The exact command I used was mogrify -format jpg *.HEIC”, don’t forget to remove the HEIC files after you’ve converted them to JPG.
VPS: virtual private server (?)
Batch converting HEIC image files to JPG using a VPS with a ton of CPU power
Free software apps: Shotwell
Runs well on my tablet
Works well in combination with advanced apps like Darktable and GIMP.
can automatically import new photos, organise them by year and month, and provide me with quick ways to export my photos.
encrypted the entire Micro SD card so that my photos remain private even if my SD card is lost or stolen.
Photo library backups
backup photos by making copies of the photo directories
using ‘rsync’,
another command line tool
– enables you to create incremental copies of directories and files
It will only copy new and modified files, which saves you a lot of time when you’re working with large libraries.
can use a task scheduler such as ‘cron’ to automate the backups
I automatically backup my photos to a server that I manage myself, which sits in a secure (and fire protected) data center.
Cloud access to my photos
Part of the appeal of the new iCloud Photos by Apple is that you can access your photos from any device, anywhere. I like this, too. Luckily, the server that I use to backup my photos can double as an ‘always on’-way to access my photos from pretty much any device. I can login to the server using the secure file transfer protocol, allowing me to browse my photo files. Alternatively you can setup protocols like WebDAV or SMB to access your files in even more ways.
access to all my photos from my iPhone using the native iOS Photos app. Although I can access all my photos through my server, the iOS Photos app is unparalleled in speed and ease of use.
In addition, I think Apple has done a truly remarkable job with the on-device machine learning that enables you to search your photos based on what’s on them. Ask Siri for photos you took of watches, cars, bikes or whatever, and it will find them in your library. This works surprisingly well and it provides novel ways to rediscover old pictures.
But it requires some sweet irony…: the only way to get this to work is to go back into the “photo jail”. In order for the iPhone’s neural engine to do its job, all your photos have to be loaded to your device. Few people know however, that you can have your photos inside the iOS photos app without the need to have a desktop Apple Photos library!
In the macOS finder you can setup photo synchronisation using a normal directory on the file system as source – no need for a full fledged iCloud Photo library!
In the macOS finder you can setup photo synchronisation using a normal directory on the file system as source – no need for a full fledged iCloud Photo library!
MacOS provides you the ability to synchronise any directory containing photos with your iPhone. As the Mac is still very much UNIX based, setting up an automatic synchronisation with my server based photo repository was as easy as configuring a cron job that uses rsync to get new photos. Then you can setup your iPhone to automatically synchronise over WiFi once it is within range of your Mac. The only downside of this approach is that you still need a Mac to do this, although I suspect that you could – in theory – achieve this using by running macOS inside a virtual machine. I’ll leave that for another time.
Happy together: Using the native iOS Photo app to browse through my entire photo collection managed with Shotwell
Happy together: Using the native iOS Photo app to browse through my entire photo collection managed with Shotwell
Conclusion
Some things require time, effort and energy to get right. For a long time I accepted my personal photo library to be in bad shape, held within the constrains of the modern Apple Photos that continues to nudge you to upload your everything into the iCloud. That has changed!
Now I am able to manage my photos using free software, enabling me to do it in exactly the way I deem fit. I took back control over my personal memories, and it feels great! The alternatives to Apple iCloud Photos are more than capable to do this – just take your time to do it right!
Fun fact: many of the older photos that I used in this blog post where rediscovered because I took the time to go through my photos. You’ll be surprised by the hidden gems in your own photo library if you take the time to revisit them!