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A problem I would pay money to see solved

Here's an idea for a micro-startup which I think would do pretty well:

Problem:

I have all of my photos on Google Photos dating back to about 2004. I really want to move them all over to iCloud as I trust Apple with data security more than Google. I looked up how to move photos between Google photos and iCloud and the standard way of doing it is by exporting all of your photos using Google Takeout and then adding them to iCloud photos. The issue with this is that Takeout exports the metadata separately from the image files as a json file, so when they're imported to iCloud they aren't sorted by date, which is pretty important.

Attempt 1:

I wrote a little python script that ran through all of the exported metadata, had it find the photo in question and update the metadata of the image. This however had a decent few edge-cases which I didn't cater to. It is also a very slow process exporting takeout, running this script through thousands of images, only to get caught on an error. I never managed to perfect this python script.

Attempt 2:

I manually selected all the photos on Google photos on my iPad (this took a long time selecting by month) and selected "Save to device" in the hopes that when all of the images were on my device I could sync those to iCloud (as the metadata is preserved this way). Google photos crashed at about 5% of the download though.

Hopeful solution:

If someone were to create a tool which would use Google Auth to authenticate me, connect to the Google API and handle moving each image to iCloud photos (or even download them with the metadata intact), I'd probably pay $30+ for that service. I'm sure there are people looking to do the inverse as well. I'd build this myself but already have a functional SaaS running that I can't really split my attention from at the moment.

I'll be your first customer!

on January 11, 2022
  1. 1

    Hi Herman, it is sound interesting.

    1. Did you develop it eventually?
    2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but one problem will be here is that each user will use it once and that's it, no subscription here, am I right?
    3. Which more features do you have in mind?