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icloud-photos-downloader / icloud_photos_downloader

A command-line tool to download photos from iCloud
MIT License
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Download from Recents, not All Photos #715

Closed mythofechelon closed 9 months ago

mythofechelon commented 10 months ago

Summary

It seems that icloudpd downloads from All Photos, rather than Recents, at least when using the argument --until-found.

Context

I'm planning to add photos to my iCloud Photo Library that have EXIF time stamps from months or even years ago. This isn't a problem in the iOS app because you can either see them in order of when they were taken in Library or in order of when they were added in recents, but I'm guessing that I won't be able to easily use icloudpd because it'd need to scan and/or redownload my entire library to pick out these new photos, rather than just downloading from the recents backwards?

AndreyNikiforov commented 9 months ago

icloudpd never redownloads file, so it is safe to run it without --until-found or --recent. These two parameters can be viewed as optimizations with "fine print".

Will using icloudpd without --until-found work for you?

mythofechelon commented 9 months ago

My test photo has an EXIF date of 2010/11/19, and I added it to my Photos on 2023/11/19. My library contains 29,471 items, and I've created 91 photos or videos since then (this is relevant).

While testing https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader/issues/715#issuecomment-1840147786, I noticed that folder <path>\iCloud Photos Backup\2010 existed and only contained my test photo, so I deleted that folder and:

  1. Ran icloudpd-latest-windows-amd64.exe --directory "<path>\iCloud Photos Backup" --username <username> --until-found 20 but nothing changed.
  2. Ran icloudpd-latest-windows-amd64.exe --directory "<path>\iCloud Photos Backup" --username <username> --until-found 100 and, after only ~10 seconds, the 2010 folder and photo re-appeared.

So, it seems that it is actually downloading from Recents after all?

AndreyNikiforov commented 9 months ago

help for -until-found: "Download most recently added photos until we find x number of previously downloaded consecutive photos"

How many photos have you added to your collected after 2023/11/19 and how many of latest of them were already downloaded to your local drive? Answers to these questions will help you answer why -until-found 20 did not work, but --until-found 100 did.

mythofechelon commented 9 months ago

I understand why one worked and the other didn't - I was provided both examples of evidence of why I think it does actually download from Recents. This can be closed now, thanks.