A download button would be great but the files are already stored on the device you can copy them with a usb or go on the device and upload it directly.

maybe I fail to see your point, but following the link, then https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/5068 is referenced which is resolved by pr https://github.com/immich-app/immich/pull/18878 adding bulk download functionality (may have manually select all to bulk download, unsure). At any rate I don't see where they say explicitly that they are against it

what do you mean download all? its your server over your files. If you want them, go get them! Or just point google / apple / whatever upload at your library directory.

There’s no download all in apple photos either unless they added it

And yet, the same is true for Apple photos about ease of export:

If you set the pref to keep originals locally, they're all on your drive, in original form, as well as the derived versions including caches of raw to jpeg, resolutions, and edited versions.

That said, Apple Photos does let you export even if only in cloud. Open the library, select all, and File > Export ... > Export Unmodified Originals.

It pauses for a second or two on my quarter million images, but is then happy to comply.

Or you can get all you data from https://privacy.apple.com/account

CMD-A then export all X unmodified originals works fine

Except when your library is huge: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/15sa6vg/how_to_downloa...

You can download all you Apple data now, including photos.

https://privacy.apple.com/account -> "Get a copy of your data"

Then you will need to chose the maximum size of an archive part and wait for link to a download page.

Yes, that's even more stupid! Best way to export photos from iCloud if you don't have mac is to use iCloud from the browser and bulk download from there, but it has a 10k files-per download limit! It also doesn't allow you to select all and partiton download this way, I had to manually increase selection until it's 10k and remember where I started.

They’re literally on a disk drive I can physically touch. I think I can figure out a migration strategy for that.

This is symptoms of a chronically cloud-native brain. What is a file system?

The immediately obvious and simple to handle on-disk format for everything I cared about was one of the things that convinced me to give it a try. Well-crafted exporters are great and all, but I really like being confident that I can convert it by hand even if the company ceases to exist.

Backups are easy too: you can very reasonably just rsync the library folder, and it'll be recoverable from that alone (I tried it! Worked great). You'll lose accounts and image-content search and iirc faces (possibly painful), but most of that is trivially rebuilt or not very interesting for single-person scenarios.

It's tricky with iOS. Plugging iPhone into a server is stupid. Adding server as a network storage in Files app is smarter, but downloading photos this way does not guarantee deduplication. Would be great if Immmich iOS app had a restore functionality as convenient as existing backup functionality.

You migrate from the server, not the client. You seem confused about what Immich is.

Maybe I'm missing something but the linked discussion has a link to a closed issue that links a PR that added the feature you say is missing.

It's just files on a disc drive. Why do you need a button for this?

I put all my files in a folder. I’d simply get them there. No concern about this at all.