possiblerobot

+1 to this method. After optimise storage is disabled on the Mac, wait for all photos to download. Then, open the photos library bundle and you'll see every photo there, full res. Copy them wherever you like.

Also, if you leave optimise storage disabled and continue to use Photos, every photo will be cloned in any local or cloud backups of your machine. This strategy creates additional photo redundancy separate from iCloud while still benefiting from library syncing.

I'd love to do that, but I haven't seen any projects that have the polish and cohesive vision that I feel pro art / design tools should have. Apps like Inkscape and GIMP have always felt pretty rough around the edges and unpleasant to me, in a way that money won't help.

Can you recommend any?

The entire Affinity Suite is now reduced to bait on a hook for an AI subscription service. This is enshittification. This arrangement will also undermine Affinity's credibility as a serious tool for work (and play!).

I just want to pay for nice software made by thoughtful people like a normal human.

Check out NextDNS. It's easier than hosting your own DNS filter. It's got plenty of knobs and switches plus lots of blocklists to choose from. (The Hagezi lists are particularly good.) Also, if you run it on your devices (in addition to your router), it filters on any network you happen to join.

Is closing the door when you poop virtue signaling? Or are people really more interested in being seen closing the door?

I think when given a set of options they understand, many people will choose more privacy from companies and the government because that’s what they want. I think that’s especially true when they understand the actual scope and scale of the surveillance.

Unless it’s an Electron turd, in which case YMMV regarding system services and interface conventions. :p

This product was clearly designed for a pre-M1 world.

You might be right with respect to non-techie users. But, it's not about whether it merely works. It's about what we could be doing with modern hardware if we used it as efficiently as old software had to use its hardware.

What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?

The schools will argue that surveillance of students promotes safety and good behavior. That might be true up to a point. But, they're missing out on the opportunity to teach a deeper, more important lesson, which is how to behave when you're not being watched.

Would we rather live in a society where people are only doing the right thing because they're being watched, or where people do the right thing because they've internalized morals and ethics so it doesn't matter if they're watched?

I'd argue the latter is better. Merely pleasing your watchers is not personal responsibility. It's control and confinement to whatever you think the watchers want to see. But, when/if the surveillance rails come off, then what happens? Then we have people who have never stood on their own ethical two feet.

Yeah, true. And, of course, Affinity has Publisher on the way next year. It's getting interesting. That completes the holy trinity. But, then there's After Effects. I'm not sure if that app has any serious competitors, now or on the horizon.

It's not just the subscription model that irritates people. The software itself has become irritating in various ways. Creative Cloud is a multi-app hydra that feels like it attaches to your system like a facehugger. Lots of people are looking for and finding exciting alternatives like Affinity Designer/Photo and Sketch. I didn't realize how slow the Adobe apps were until I started using Affinity. Those apps are fast. Not only that, but they are fun to use and got me really excited about creating things again. Super bonus: you just drop the apps in your app folder to install. Boom. Despite moving to the cloud, the Adobe apps feel legacy compared to newer options.

One reason why Adobe continues to make a lot of money is that Photoshop and Illustrator files are like what Word and Excel files are in businesses and universities: currency. People trade these formats around, which makes them way more durable. But that durability can't make up for a more important aspect of some software — especially creative software — whether or not people love using it. Go to the Affinity forums and witness the fire in people's hearts. I imagine there was a time when people felt that way about Photoshop. It's not that I want Adobe to fail. I just want great software.

All I'm saying is: don't mistake Adobe's ability to make money as a sign of love for its products.

Totally. I've got an encrypted sparsedisk image for anything that needs to be truly secure. That's definitely a caveat though, because its contents can only be edited from my Mac. On the other hand, I didn't trust Evernote that much either.

I've made that switch recently, after losing some stuff in Evernote for what I decided was the last time. I briefly messed around with SimpleNote, which was immediately doing weird stuff with tags (duplicating, not accepting changes). Then, I replicated my Evernote structure with folders and txt files in Dropbox. It works perfectly. And, there's a bunch of clients that edit txt files right in Dropbox, like Byword (OS X and iOS), Plaintext (iOS), Notesy (iOS), Ulysses (OS X), TextEdit + Spotlight (OS X), etc. You can switch apps on a whim and leave your data in place, and the syncing has been great. Simple, clean, and non-proprietary. I haven't checked into audio recording + Dropbox, but surely there are mobile apps for that, too.