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Common questions
We wanted a fully streaming architecture, so that a huge library could be transferred from an iPhone with limited storage. Album Connect breaks the upload into 1 GB parts, uploads each part separately, and then evicts that part from local storage.
There was no way to accomplish this using files, so folders were the only choice. We accomplish this same trick for Google Drive by only using the API, and not using the Finder-style interface.
No — there is nowhere for them to go. Album Connect has no server, no account, and no sign-up. Your photographs are read on your device and written to your own storage, and nothing about them is sent to us. There is no analytics and no telemetry.
The only accounts involved are ones you already have. If you use iCloud, Google Drive, or Google Photos, the app talks directly to yours, asking for the narrowest permissions those services offer, and you can disconnect at any time. The companion web app works the same way: your package is processed in your browser and is never uploaded to us.
The one exception is this page. A support message and any files you attach are sent to us, because that is what you asked for — so please do not attach anything you would not want us to read.
Between Apple Photos libraries, yes. Capture dates down to the second — including ones you corrected by hand — GPS locations, captions, titles, keywords, and favourites all travel with the photo. Your edited version arrives as the photo, with the untouched original alongside it. Live Photos stay paired, and a RAW+JPEG pair stays a pair. Nothing is re-encoded or resized at any point.
Google Photos is the exception, and not by our choice: Google's picker hands out fewer metadata fields than Apple Photos holds, and their upload interface cannot create motion photos. The Help section inside the app lists exactly what Google drops.
The collection can be larger than the device that it is on. Our fully streaming architecture writes to iCloud or Google Drive in parts of about a gigabyte and clears each part once it has been sent. The free space you need is roughly one part plus the size of the largest video — not the size of the collection. A 100 GB transfer has been made from a device that had only a few gigabytes to spare.
If a collection genuinely will not fit, Album Connect tells you before it starts and names the single largest video that is the limit, rather than failing part-way through.
Yes, through Google Photos. Copy the collection to Google Drive from Manage Sharing, which gives you a link to send. Your recipient pastes that link into the free web app at albumdrop.holden.digital, which reads the parts straight from Drive and loads the photos into their Google Photos library. They don't need an Apple device, and there is nothing to install.
Only for the Google parts. Moving albums between Apple Photos libraries, building a package from a folder on disk, and the organising tools all work with no Google account at all. You sign in with Google only when you ask Album Connect to read from Google Photos, write to it, or use Google Drive as the place your collection is stored.
Nearly. Reading from and writing to Apple Photos and Google Photos, and the organizing tools, all work on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and real Apple Photos folders are created on every one of them.
Three things are Mac-only, because iOS devices are not filesystem-centric: building a package from a macOS folder of files on disk, extracting one back out to a macOS folder, and importing a Google Takeout export. Apple Photos folders are created on an iPhone and are visible in Photos there, but the iOS Photos app there cannot rearrange them — use a Mac if you need to move things around.