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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

Does it sync photos from the iOS camera roll? I assume not since the screenshots in App Store don’t look like it. But if it does, and keeps the albums, then it would be useful to me. Currently I transfer my photos from my phone to an external drive using the iMazing app on macOS with the phone connected.

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Apple makes it surprisingly difficult to synchronize photos outside of their iCloud offering and I'm willing to bet that this is no accident.

Also worth mentioning if it makes a difference, I only need to be able to transfer photos off of the phone (along with info about which albums they belong to as mentioned), and don't need to sync in the other direction onto the phone.

I'm about to pull the trigger of getting a mac mini just to get it all into the syncthing and autobackups using the following workflow:

* iphone -> icloud

* icloud -> mac

* mac -> syncthing to the backup server

Standard backup policies from that point on.

You may be interested in Libimobiledevice that lets you sync an iPhone to Linux. That may work also with a mac?

I just found out about this tool from this (recent) thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27758045

In the end this might be the most simple and workable solution. Still feels kind of bad having to roundtrip all the data through the cloud when trying to get it from one local device to another.

I use the app PhotoSync with great success. I was about to setup my old MacBook like you described, but now I don’t have to anymore.

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