Apple introduces a new way to transfer your cloud storage

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This tool lets users make a copy of their entire library and send it to another cloud storage service.
Currently the only service that works with this new feature is Google Photos.
More cloud storage services should be joining soon.

Earlier this week, Apple introduced a new service which is designed to help transfer all the photos and videos stored in iCloud Photos to Google Photos. Similar features have been introduced by multiple tech companies to offer greater data management options to customers. Apple is proactively showing their cooperation with the introduction of this new feature following the introduction of Apple’s Data & Privacy website in 2018.

The How....

The user has to sign in to Apple's privacy website with their Apple ID, and select the ‘Transfer a copy of your data’ option. As of now, Google Photos is the only participating service for this new feature, however more cloud storage services are expected to be joining soon. In order to perform the transfer, two-factor authentication must be enabled for the respective Apple ID. In addition to that, the user should also have a legitimate Google account along with enough Google Drive Storage available for the data to be transferred. The process is not expected to take more than a week. Using this service does not delete any of the media in iCloud Photos, rather it just creates a copy of all of them in Google Photos. However, Smart Albums, Live Photos, Your Photo Stream, some metadata and RAW photos are not transferred, since their formats are unknown to Google Photos.

Google Photos supports the following formats: BMP, GIF, HEIC, ICO, JPG, PNG, TIFF, WEBP, some RAW files: for Photos

3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, DIVX, M2T, M2TS, M4V, MKV, MMV, MOD, MOV, MP4, MPG, MTS, TOD, WMV: for Videos

Yet, Live photos will be converted to a still image and then transferred with the original ones staying in iCloud Photos. It will also unify duplicate photos into a single one and only transfer the latest edit of a photo keeping the original version in iCloud.

This new service is currently available to all iCloud users in Canada, the European Union, Australia, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with support for new countries coming soon.

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Published to Apple Scoop on 5th March, 2021.