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Dcschwartz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 4, 2013
24
0
Thank you in advance for your help.

My wife and I take a lot of pictures and I want to be able to have all of our pictures saved locally on my windows PC, both for organizational purposes but also to make external backups. The catch is that I refuse to use a cable anymore - I spend hours pulling my hair out because the backup software screws up, the iphone disconnects mid-backup, or the computer just flat out can't find my wife's iphone sometimes.

How does a family with 2 or more apple IDs (with a shared iCloud data plan) do this?

We have a PC with 3 TB HDD running Windows, my iPhone, my wife's iPhone, and an Apple TV 4k. I upgraded our family's iCloud storage to 2TB, but I can't figure out the local saving part. I know I can download pictures one by one from icloud.com (absolutely ridiculous) or I can have one of our accounts sync to the PC through iCloud for Windows, but it doesn't look like their is an adequate solution.

At a bare minimum I want both of our pictures automatically downloaded to a local folder; ideally, each person's pictures would be dumped into their own local folder.

It also occurred to me that we could combine our "stuff" onto a single Apple ID account so that all our pictures would be combined and easily backed up, but then all our stuff would be combined. I'm ok with this for most things (it is ok that pictures show up on both phones, my wife doesn't have safari bookmarks, we can split our contacts into groups, I don't use an icloud calendar, we could share reminders, etc.) but I am unsure about other things like getting each other's facetime calls or imessages.

I'm open to other solutions that doesn't involve me losing my mind from frustration - thank you!
 
I'm interested in this as well. I currently have the 200GB iCloud storage plan and am completely reliant upon iCloud storage currently. I'm concerned about the completely reliant for multiple reasons.

I will say that one thing I have thought about doing is purchasing a Mac Mini and leaving it always on and connected to a NAS or HDD (locally attached). I would log in with my iCloud account and then set it to download originals to this computer. That would allow for all of my (one) iCloud accounts to be completely backed up locally and remotely.

I do not know how this works with two Apple ID's. It is also a costly solution. Mac Mini's are not cheap and are very old.
 
Someone outside of this thread recommended running two versions of icloud for windows using windows own capabilities. The only "hacking" required would be to force it to start up every time.

Anyone have a better solution that that or using 1 apple id?
 
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