Vasilis’ nerd blog presents
When, years ago, apple offered the option to sync my photos to their cloud I accepted the offer. At first I didn’t really think about it, but later on I realised that all my pictures are now accessible to an american company, which is ridiculous. Here’s how I got rid of icloud for my pictures.
The nice thing about syncing your photos to a service like icloud is that your photos will not be gone if you lose your phone. There are options to host these kinds of services yourself. I chose immich, an open source project, which is really well designed1. Immich runs on a raspberry pi here at home. I put all my photo’s into immich, not just the pictures I took with my iphone. Everything is in there, also the pictures I took decades ago with my very first digital camera, and also the pictures I take with my dslr-camera. I can now browse through my complete, decades spanning photo archive, directly from my phone, and from my mac, wherever I am. I love it.
Before you start deleting your photos from icloud, make sure you have a solid backup plan. The complete immich photo library is backed up to another harddrive, here at home, daily. It’s also backed up to an offsite disk, hosted by a european company in europe. So if something happens to my house, I still have my images. I would prefer to do this without using any company, but I don’t have a second house, so I can’t do this myself2.
This should be a solid backup strategy: if something happens to the main disk, I have a backup disk. If disaster strikes and something happens to both disks here at home, I have a remote backup. And if disaster happens simultaneously here at home and in the remote server location I probably don’t care about my pictures anymore.
Deleting photos from icloud is a bit harder than you might think. On my iphone I first went to my icloud settings and disabled the option to sync my photos. I then chose to delete all my pictures from my phone. I can acces them via the immich app, I don’t need the photos app anymore. Then on my mac I selected all the photos in my library and deleted them. You might think that this is it, but apple doesn’t delete all images right away, it puts them in a pre-delete place for 30 days called recently deleted items. There I found the option to delete all items from the recently deleted items list, and when it was done I switched of the Sync to icloud option in the preferences.
I assumed that all my pictures were now deleted from icloud, but they were not. I logged in to icloud with a browser, went to the photos section, and to my surprise I found that all my pictures were still there, in still accessible in the recently deleted items section. So I selected all of them, clicked the delete all button, and was prompted with the message that you cannot delete more than 1000 picture at a time. This means you have to manually select 1000 pictures, hit the delete button, and repeat that until all pictures are gone. Which is what I did. You can also just wait for 30 days.
All my pictures are now removed from icloud3, and they are fully backup up, under my own control.