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Comment by radicality | Hacker News Reader

For photos, I could perhaps recommend the following sequence: 1) Get an apple device where you're able to sync the _whole_ photos albums. This can be on an external drive, you can relocate the main library there. Make sure to select the option to download full pics and not to optimize storage. 2) Use this library help parse the photos.db database and write out your data however you wish (by album, or whatever). https://pypi.org/project/osxphotos/

I believe you can also do 2) just by itself and it will download photos as required, but I would still recommend fetching the whole photos library via Photos first.

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> sync the _whole_ photos albums

This sounds like a dumb question, but it's exactly what I want to do but haven't figured out how for a couple of years. How do you do that? I have the Photos app, and sync many pictures to it. I can sync from Photos to cloud. But how do I make it _download_ all photos that are on iCloud to my Photos app?

I tend to feel worried with syncing in case something is deleted, not added. I haven't spotted any clear non-destructive sync option. I likely misunderstand the UI.

Open Photos app on the Mac, go to "Photos -> Preferences", go to "iCloud", and tick the "Download Originals" checkbox. Make sure you have enough hdd space to store the whole collection locally.

This will make Photos start downloading all the full, original pictures and videos in your iCloud library into the folder `~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/`.

You can actually skip #2, I f you set ‘full library download’ all originals are downloaded to your library folder. Easy enough to take them elsewhere.

I do this so all my pictures are included in my (off-Apple) backups.

Yeah, that's true, but there's still a use case for it imo. I have hundreds of manually created albums, lots of Smart Albums with various criteria etc. That python module gives you a lot of control if you want to say export only specific albums, or say batch process a few hundred albums and export them somewhere else. The Photos app 'Export' option is quite limited.

Two issues:

- I don't have OSX

- I don't have an Apple iDevice capable of storing my entire Photos library.

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