Transferring iCloud Photos
Data Transfer Project (via Hacker News):
The Data Transfer Project was launched in 2018 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.
The contributors to the Data Transfer Project believe portability and interoperability are central to innovation. Making it easier for individuals to choose among services facilitates competition, empowers individuals to try new services and enables them to choose the offering that best suits their needs.
Apple (via Juli Clover):
You can request to transfer a copy of photos and videos you store in iCloud Photos to Google Photos. Transferring photos and videos from iCloud Photos doesn’t remove or alter the content you store with Apple, but sends a copy of your content to the other service.
The transfer process takes between three and seven days. We use this time to verify that the request was made by you, and to make the transfer.
Some data and formats available in iCloud Photos—such as Smart Albums, Live Photos, or some RAW files—may not be available when you transfer your content to another service.
I can now transfer my iCloud photos to another service.
When will I be able to copy my iCloud data to another iCloud account so I can merge it into a single account? ⏱
Curious that you can transfer to Google Photos images from two of its biggest competitors, Facebook and now Apple’s iCloud Photos, but not from Google to either of those.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
It seems flat out weird that Apple is making it easy to export iCloud Photos to a competitor, and specifically only Google Photos. There must be some logical explanation? Legislation they're complying with or... ? Why would Apple spend the resources? It's already easy enough to export iCloud Photos to disk and then bulk upload them to Google Photos.
This isn't exactly what people want, but Google has historically been pretty good about allowing people to get data out of their services. With Google Takeout, you can easily export all of your pictures stored on Google Photos:
https://takeout.google.com/
