Python iOS photo sync

Python scripts to sync an (non jailbroken) iPhone's photos to a linux (or windows / mac) computer without iTunes or iCloud. This runs a server on the phone using Pythonista, then the computer communicates to this server to obtain the photos.

Warning Only run any of this on a network you completely trust. There is no authentication or encryption.

Usage

Copy phone.py to your phone. Run that in Pythonista 3.

Then on the PC it's easiest set the following environment variable to the hostname of your phone;

export REPL_HOST=<iphone_hostname>.local

After that one can run:

./sync.py -v sync --dir "/tmp/my_photo_storage/"

Syncing looks like:

  449 /   478:        IMG_0397.HEIC 2022-10-29 23:51:50 (  2030072 bytes)
  450 /   478:        IMG_0398.HEIC 2022-10-29 23:52:00 (  1851551 bytes)
  451 /   478:         IMG_0399.PNG 2022-10-30 15:30:45 (   648208 bytes)

Default file structure is:

/tmp/my_photo_storage/$ tree
.
└── 2022-10
    ├── IMG_0018.HEIC
    ├── IMG_0019.PNG
    └── metadata
        ├── IMG_0018.json
        └── IMG_0019.json

This can be modified with commandline arguments.

The deletion of old photos can be ran with:

./sync.py -v delete --dir "/tmp/my_photo_storage/"

The phone will only delete photos if the request contains the full metadata and the correct md5 of the photo. So the sync script has to prove to the phone script it has the metadata and photo available.

Development

Use the socketserverREPL functionality, start that on the phone and use run_phone.sh. After closing the connection from the REPL, be sure to load the http://<iphone_hostname>.local:1338 a few times to ensure the connection is refused before running this script again to deploy and run the latest.

Easiest way to bootstrap this is to run python3 -m http.server on your PC, open the socketserverREPL.py script in the browser on your phone, copy all the text, then paste this into a new script in Pythonista, then run that.