Synctrain doesn't backup images from iCloud

[thibaultamartin]

Hi and thanks for making Synctrain, the app is excellent!

I've tried to do a full backup of my photos gallery from my iPhone, and Synctrain correctly identified a very large number of pictures to export (34K photos and 20K Live Photos).

But it only seems to have backed up the photos that were locally cached on my phone. When a photo only has a thumbnail on my phone and the full version in my iCloud library, Synctrain doesn't seem to export it.

Did I misconfigure something, or is it a limitation of the app / iOS?

[pixelspark]

Thank you for the kind words!

Synctrain indeed does not export photos from iCloud. This is by design, it asks the system to retrieve photos without network access. This is done because otherwise the photo back-up can become very slow (waiting for all photos to download). The assumption being that photos in iCloud are backed up anyway.

[thibaultamartin]

In my case I wanted to rely on Synctrain because I have Advanced Data Protection enabled. This means I can’t just dump photos from iCloud.

I’ll try to figure out a way with a spare Mac!

[jtulak]

I assume that a fresh photos stay local for a day or few, so it should be possible to back it up before it gets offloaded. So the problem likely is just how to back up already existing ones, right? Maybe you could just spent a bit of time exporting large batches manually right to the location of your backup on your mac. Or let AI to write a little script to do it. :P