bye-cloud: Take your iCloud photos to Immich

I set up Immich and exported all my data from iCloud, but I needed a way to reorgnize Apple’s data dump.

Apple will give you your iCloud data if you request it, but they make it as inconvenient as possible. It takes days to process your request, and the files are organized in a way that works for them, not you. There is metadata in CSVs and JSON files, that includes information about the photos and what albums they belong to.

I wanted a simple folder structure to represent albums (including their generated “memories”), and very importantly I wanted to preserve data information which is not consistently present in the image files themselves, so I needed a way to stitch the data back into the images, and reorganize the images into folders.

From there I was able to import it with immich-go, a really cool tool that just doesn’t have specific support for iCloud exports yet.

So I created bye-cloud, a program that was useful to me exactly once, and decied to publish it. A few months later, I took a pass at spiffing up the code base with Claude Code – adding testing and distributing on Homebrew.

Usage is pretty simple, so check out the code and docs here: https://github.com/jakekara/bye-cloud.

I have pretty complicated and conflicting feelings about using AI for coding, which I will explore more but not here. If one person besides me uses it to leave the Apple ecosystem, I think it’s worth it. It was a lot of effort to write it from scratch, and there was no way I would have written tests or packaged it for Homebrew without a faster way to write the code.