So…

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

So…

…all the work I've been doing to consolidate a single downloaded music library filesystem I can access from my desktop(s) and my phone alike has suddenly got me thinking maybe I need to do that…

…for all of my iCloud photos & videos. And I am suddenly filled with dread as that means downloading/organizing 49,175 photos & 4,076 videos comprising nearly 800GB of data.

😭

[skinnylatte@hachyderm.io]

@jaredwhite I had more. It’s not so bad. You don’t need to do much of it manually. A lot of the open source photo tools like photoprism and inmich have pretty good organizing things that respect your old albums and hierarchy or suggest new ones based on dates or place. You can use the command line iCloud downloader.

Downloading from google photos was much more of a shit show (their take out format really messed up metadata)

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

I presumably have something like that already, as my Photos library in macOS is set to download original files on a big external drive, but it also seems like it's been "stuck" on several thousand to go for forever, plus the actual library filesystem is insane. I don't really know how to get it out of the Photos silo and trust it's actually everything. 🙃

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

@skinnylatte good to know! was this the downloader CLI tool you used? https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader

[thejaysunday@mamot.fr]

@jaredwhite how d'you do it for the music files?

[skinnylatte@hachyderm.io]

@jaredwhite yup!

[fayedrake@furry.engineer]

@jaredwhite that’s the trap of SaaS, the problem has grown to the point where it’s next to impossible to manage yourself

It’s going to be an ongoing project for me for a while, and my library isn’t even that big.

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

@thejaysunday it's been a long and complicated process, I've been saying for over a year now I'll do a whole write up on it and I still intend to do that! 😅

[jaredwhite@indieweb.social]

@FayeDrake at this point if I ask myself the question who controls all of my most precious digital data and the answer is some asshole megacorp, then uh I need to fix some things. 🤪

[thejaysunday@mamot.fr]

@jaredwhite I'm interested because I just did one :) https://www.thepackage.fr/reprendre-sa-discotheque-en-main-de-locean-a-la-piscine-de-luxe it's in french but you could easily auto translate it

[ecomba@ruby.social]

@jaredwhite I’m about to embark on this odyssey too. Over the last few years I’ve de-big-teched my other services and now I’m going to de-cloud (my NAS-ish machine is arriving literally today).

I looked into this in preparation and I’m going to try setting this up using UmbrelOs 🤞

[fayedrake@furry.engineer]

@jaredwhite I’m putting off buying a proper NAS and working out how to deal real back ups.

If I ask around I can probably get someone to tell me how to put mechanisms in place to validate data integrity in long term storage.

[fayedrake@furry.engineer]

@jaredwhite maybe there’s a smaller company around who will do the job for me for a nominal fee

[catawu@mastodon.social]

@jaredwhite Force Sync?

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@jaredwhite Jared, a quick heads up that in my experience, when you download photos from iCloud, they lose their metadata... the create date is turned into the download date (if it makes sense). I hate it.

I have a ritual where I download the photos of the previous month, pass them through the software Photo Exifer (https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/photo-exifer/id1094567805?mt=12), restore the create date and then rename the files so that they start with YYYY-MM-DD