No. They're not. You export photos using Google Takeout, iCloud has something similar. And their own iOS app also has unresolved bugs because of which I can't fully import my gallery.
There's no "black box" magic here. Sure, there are some edge cases that need to be handled when importing the exported dataset, but it's all documented.
> No. They're not. You export photos using Google Takeout, iCloud has something similar.
So, they are black boxes that don't make things easy or convenient for people. E.g. Google Takeout separates images and their metadata. With people running into issues like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/1lqx331/googl... (as comments point out, Google just randomly changes file names as well, which breaks import tools)
> Sure, there are some edge cases that need to be handled when importing the exported dataset, but it's all documented.
As in: it's not really documented. Those takeouts, iCloud and Google shenanigans etc. have been reverse engineered by people to work. Meanwhile for closest friends only Apple, Google and some of their closes friends provide a way to transfer libraries directly, without "takeouts" and workarounds: https://portmap.dtinit.org/
This is why I said A-B testing would be important.
BUT, that's irrelevant: their own iOS app butchers Live Photos and there's unresolved bugs that get hardly any traction. This isn't rocket science here, no wild-guessing, they get access to the Photo library like any other app using their SDK. They just lose those Live Photos when backing up to immich and no one got to the bottom of it.
WHY do you keep ignoring that aspect that I have mentioned like 3 times by now?
> WHY do you keep ignoring that aspect that I have mentioned like 3 times by now?
Which aspect? The only "aspect" you're talking about is, basically, "immich should make this fully documented easily and trivially implemented batch backup from iCloud Photos/Google Photos".
I mean, even live photos isn't documented anywhere, and Apple changes how it's implemented from time to time (e.g. moving from JPEG + MOV to HEIC + H.265).
There's no "black box" magic here. Sure, there are some edge cases that need to be handled when importing the exported dataset, but it's all documented.