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Comment by simjnd | Hacker News Reader

If you have macOS you don't need either, just plug your iPhone open up "/Applications/Image Capture.app" and it will show your photos. You can select and drag and drop to a disk and delete them all from this app.

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Having it happen automatically is what I was after, and that isn’t particularly easy to achieve. There must surely be a better way than my nasty hack, but I do now have automatic backups of iPhone photos onto a nas:

A VM running macOS and a script. Open Photos.app and sync with ‘Download Originals’ checked. Quit Photos.app and rsync the folder ‘Originals’ out of the app bundle and onto a NAS. Once finished, reopen Photos.app.

It’s quite horrible getting the script to run as permissions get tricky with chrontab, so I used Lingon X to schedule it.

Maybe try it with an app on the phone instead? I've been using Synology's photos app to automatically upload everything in my photos library to my NAS for a couple of months now, and it's been seamless. Other apps, like PhotoSync, seem to offer similar functionality in a platform-independent way.

Thank you - I’ve had this suggested before but just couldn’t get it to work. I’ll have another go as that is obviously way better (and saves running a very large VM).

Modern versions of iTunes and modern iOS versions can be set up so that whenever they are on the same network iTunes automatically backs up over WiFi in the background. Then it's just a matter of a cron job pushing the files to the NAS.

That’s not a million miles off what I’m doing. It’s unhelpful that there isn’t a built in way to get images out of Photos.app as downloading a full library can use a lot of storage.

My bad, I misunderstood. Do you do all of this with an AppleScript? I would be really interested to look at this if you have it hosted on a repo somewhere.

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