Mike Peterson
Apple has debuted a new tool that allows users to transfer copies of their iCloud Photos to another service, with Google Photos being the first integration.
As the company outlined in a new support document, there's a new "Transfer a copy of your data" option on Apple's privacy website that can be used to transfer iCloud media content to Google Photos.
The process doesn't delete any content from iCloud, but transfers a copy of a user's photos and videos to Google Photos. That could make the tool useful for both transferring services and backup purposes.
However, only the most recent edit of a photo is transferred and duplicates will show up as a single piece of content. Smart Albums, Live Photos, photo stream content, and some other format types aren't currently supported. Videos are transferred separately, while photos will likely be transferred together in their own albums.
Users will need two-factor authentication locking down their Apple ID and a Google Photos account with enough storage space for their iCloud content. The transfer takes between three and seven days.
The service is available in Australia, Canada, the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S. at launch. The service can be accessed online on Apple's privacy webpage.
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12 Comments
Why? Why all of a sudden is Google portrayed as a good guy? Does Google own rights to all photos stored on Google servers? Thought I read that some place. I believe Facebook does. Is Apple being pressured to do this?
probably a preventative step against monopolistic rhetoric
I gave up on doing the photo copy function and trying paste a photo it on to message forums and email. It just does nothing in the paste. I think it is a bug or Apple is overprotect because of copyright. I have to transfer it to Pinterest or Intragram and then copy it from there.
Without looking at all of the details, I'm okay with this because it will give users the option of having an additional backup copy of their photos on a different server platform. Hopefully they'll bring in support for OneDrive and Amazon Drive soon.
Of course this could also lead to a lot of synching and coherency issues and generate needless duplication. I do think we're all heading down a path of having to come to terms with defining our own separation between ephemeral data and archival data. Having our cyber-hoard of data duplicated across multiple server platforms doesn't really get us any closer to dealing with it, it simply increases the total footprint, and cost, of our data hoard.