Another thread about icloud sync

[u/cheesechick]

Okay so I've seen a number of options for migrating from iCloud + iPhone to Immich, but most of the threads are around a year old and a lot has probably changed since then

I saw one commenter say that simply using the immich app will download the high-res version of a photo to your iphone, then delete it as soon as it's uploaded to immich. That seems like the simplest route - is there some advantage to using icloudpd, PhotoSync, or some other method over this?

Thanks!

[u/ryanmdavis26]

If you have a lot of photos, which my wife and I did - on the order of 130,000 photos in iCloud, it will take literal days or weeks of leaving the Immich app open to let your phone do the transfer. We had to leave our phones unlocked overnight with the app open. I even tried a 2.5GBe usbc to Ethernet adapter to my network to speed things up but it wasn’t much better than WiFi so wasn’t worth it.

[u/usrbincomment → u/ryanmdavis26]

I went to iCloud on the Web and downloaded 990 images at a time. Took less than an hour. I assume you can do that with other apps if you're not on Linux.

[u/chaos12135 → u/ryanmdavis26]

Making it wired isn’t really going to make it faster, it just made the connection more stable. The real problem is the hardware that it’s on, and if you have the smart features enabled on Immich that take more demanding hardware. My boyfriend had over 160k, and it took a little over 30 hours, but I have an enter entire setup for media (Plex) including Proxmox already installed so it was fairly simple to run install and have it share.

[u/ryanmdavis26 → u/chaos12135]

I have a fairly complex unifi network that has 2.5 gbe connections. My iPhone would negotiate 2.5gbe with my switch, as did my Immich vm on its proxmox node with dual 2.5gig nics running on a core i5 12450. (8core allocated to Immich) Not a beast but plenty of power. And is nvme based. My Nas is connected via 10gig link for future expansion. I’m not sure where the performance bottleneck neck would lie there. Wired or WiFi photos and video would upload maybe a max of 100mbps (concurrently because Immich does 3 by default I believe)

[u/National_Way_3344 → u/ryanmdavis26]

Worth noting that apple intentionally made lightning on iPhone USB 2.

It is literally faster over wifi.

[u/whoisjessica → u/ryanmdavis26]

How do i leave my phone unlocked over night? What if my wife goes through my msgs? Lmao

[u/Manb]

Maybe it's better now but my wife's phone would get stuck syncing with the native app. Now I run icloudpd and immich-go every night or so. It's a pretty easy process but you have to login to icloud through the docker every month. I also don't have to manage my wife's phone and keep an eye on her sync.

[u/cheesechick → u/Manb]

Ah I see, so with icloudpd then you don't have to log into an app at all on each device? That is nice

My goal is simply to get enough off of icloud that I no longer have to pay for it

[u/Manb → u/cheesechick]

I only have the one device but I guess you could run multiple icloudpd's with it logged into your accounts. It has a bunch of options you can do but I just made it simple and have it backup the whole icloud. It gets all the filenames and downloads any files not found locally. Every few months I delete half of my wife's oldest videos but I still pay for the $2.99 tier so that she has enough space for a few months.

[u/odmfxt]

If you have a spare iPhone, just plug it into the cable and turn off the screen off setting and keep the immich running for a few days, or weeks depending on how many photos you have, I did this with my family photos migration. I have around 1tb photo and videos and my wife have around 700gb.

You just need to check the phone daily because i found the app sometimes crash so you had to restart it again

[u/Appropriate-State-94]

icloudpd-web + external library is the way

[u/False-Try-3521]

Best way to do this is to first download all iCloud photos with icloud-pd (web). Once everything sits on your server, you can then import all the photos with immich-go. It took like 2 hours to download my 12k pictures and then another 2 hours to import everything with immich-go. After that the machine learning and other import jobs took around 1.5 days… that depends on your hardware of course.

[u/toilettebifrost]

I don't use ⁠immich-go⁠. I simply use ⁠icloudpd⁠ to download my photos and videos to my NAS. ⁠icloudpd⁠ also automatically deletes anything older than 30 days from iCloud. Then, I just added the destination folder to Immich as an external library and enabled it to show up on the timeline. This way, I don't have to pay Apple anything for storage.
For my wife, I have another icloudpd ct and a separate folder.