Exiftools

Picasa and iPhoto Picasa and iPhoto were great apps. Both were free. Both allowed you to manage your photos locally and both allowed you to take pictures with photo cameras, or your phone, and sync them then you got home. Over time our phones synced via the cloud to these apps. We lost the habit of getting home and ingesting photos because everything was done automatically. We took pictures and they appeared in Picasa and iCloud and we didn’t think about it too much.

In an ideal world Google Photos, iCloud Photos, MyCloud (Swisscom) and other photo backup solutions would back up your photos into a directory structure that you can access and download from with ease and convenience. Unfortunately non of them want to offer that. That is why finding a workflow to get data out is worthwhile. Remember, a cloud solution, where you can’t get media files back out, is not a backup solution.