how do I access my photo stream from linux?

You can't.

Well, that's a non-useful answer. Consider googling before you typed?

You can use a virtual machine. You can install iTunes under Wine. You can gateway the photos to a service such as Flickr or Picasa.

Just to start 😉

1kenthomas wrote:

You can install iTunes under Wine.

iTunes has nothing whatever to do with PhotoStream.

You can gateway the photos to a service such as Flickr or Picasa.

Doing that isn't PhotoStream. PhotoStream provides automatic delivery of photos taken on or added to one device or Mac onto all the other compliant devices or Macs signed into that iCloud account. That specific facilitiy isn't available in Linux.

Consider reading the Apple description of it before you type 😁.

You can now accomplish nearly the same thing with the Google+ app, and Picasa, FWIW.

True but right now I get all my photos taken in the iPhone synchronized to iCloud (and nothing else).

I would like to get them from there and forward them to a more open cloud (dropbox, skydrive, ...) which is easier to synch to from other devices.

Ideally I would like to do it via a headless linux but as far as I could see the chances to access iCloud in a reasonable way from linux are tiny

On your iphone, you can download the Dropbox app and enable instant photo upload, which will upload your camera roll to your dropbox folder. Then you can use incron or a similar program to move the photos where you'd prefer.

This is an excellent idea. I have incron set up already to handle other files so this will be the perfect solution - thanks!

Glad I could help!

I'm trying to get this to work myself, however my incron does not seem to work (at least on my Dropbox folders). If you get it to work, could you post your incrontab entry? It would be much appreciated.

Mr. Wilmut. Not only is your attitude offensive and not helpful, but your blatent denial of technical workarounds leaves me to believe you simply have no brain. Just because Apple makes 'photostream' a proprietary service, does not mean that cloud storage is a proprietary technology. Perhaps you should stop thinking in Applescript, Milkman's suggestion to use Dropbox is my solution. Milkman why do you need to use incron? Dropox daemon handles listening events...or are you trying to achieve something specific?

Dropbox will get them on the linux machine, but as far as I know, it only works on files in the dropbox folder. So incron can take them once they are in the dropbox folder and place them wherever you actually want them. I (wanted to) use this so that I don't fill my dropbox up with all my photos once they are synced to my linux machine.

That said, I wasn't able to get this to work, and upon investigating, it seemed to be a problem with the space in the "Camera Upload" folder, which incron isn't good at dealing with. But I also have so much dropbox space right now from various promotions that I haven't worried about it in a while.

oh. could ln -s ~/Dropbox/Camera \ Uploads /path/to/where/you/wanna/go/but/this/path/is/too/long/unless/you/like/long/path s

That would work for accessing them outside your dropbox folder, which is fine, but I believe the pictures would still be in the dropbox folder, and therefore still count toward your dropbox quota, which I wanted to avoid. But if all you want is to have a link to the folder from elsewhere on the system, that should work perfectly.

ahh totally...i didn't even think about quota. Just out of curiosity i am gonna try a simple incrontab to see if it will work...

Well let me know if you get it working, as I said before the space in "Camera Uploads" always seemed to cause me problems, but I've never used it before so I'm not sure how it works with spaces.

ok so I got it set up and working using a python utility called watcher.

   git clone https://github.com/splitbrain/Watcher && cd Watcher

nano watcher.ini

this is what I have for this config file:

; ---------------------- ; General Settings ; ---------------------- [DEFAULT]

; where to store output

logfile=/tmp/watcher.log

; where to save the PID file

pidfile=/tmp/watcher.pid

; ----------------------

; Job Setups

; ----------------------  [job1]

; directory or file to watch.  Probably should be abs path.

watch=/home/cam/Dropbox/Camera Uploads/

; list of events to watch for.

; supported events: ; 'access' - File was accessed (read) (*)

; 'attribute_change' - Metadata changed (permissions, timestamps, extended attributes, etc.) (*)

; 'write_close' - File opened for writing was closed (*)

; 'nowrite_close' - File not opened for writing was closed (*)

; 'create' - File/directory created in watched directory (*)

; 'delete' - File/directory deleted from watched directory (*)

; 'self_delete' - Watched file/directory was itself deleted

; 'modify' - File was modified (*)

; 'self_move' - Watched file/directory was itself moved

; 'move_from' - File moved out of watched directory (*)

; 'move_to' - File moved into watched directory (*)

; 'open' - File was opened (*)

; 'all' - Any of the above events are fired

; 'move' - A combination of 'move_from' and 'move_to'

; 'close' - A combination of 'write_close' and 'nowrite_close'

;

; When monitoring a directory, the events marked with an asterisk (*) above

; can occur for files in the directory, in which case the name field in the

; returned event data identifies the name of the file within the directory.

events=create,delete,modify,open,

; Comma separated list of excluded dir. Absolute path needed.

; Leave blank if no excluded dir setted

excluded=

; if true, watcher will monitor directories recursively for changes recursive=true

; if true, watcher will automatically watch new subdirectory autoadd=true

; the command to run. Can be any command. It's run as whatever user started watcher.

; The following wildards may be used inside command specification:

; $$ dollar sign

; $watched watched filesystem path (see above)

; $filename event-related file name

; $tflags event flags (textually)

; $nflags event flags (numerically)

command=mv $filename  /home/cam/Pictures/Elite*

Set the command to equal the command you want to use to move pictures also may be a good idea if you don't have python-virtualenv to get it (for ubuntu)

sudo apt-get install -y python-virtualenv

run the following from the Watcher directory root

virtualenv .

make sure that the this environment's bin is set in your $PYTHONPATH variable

PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:./bin:

#install dependency pyinotify

pip install pyinotify

then run this to start watcher

python watcher.py -c watcher.ini debug

you can then a verbose output of the daemon, so what i did was took a picture, opened dropbox app on phone, it uploaded to dropbox, and was immediately moved out into the folder I specified. Of course you will need to do an inital move of all photos prior to running the daemon, because this is only going to watch for new additions. Stop the daemon with Ctrl +Z and

python watcher.py -c watcher.ini stop

python watcher.py -c watcher.ini start

i don't ever trust restart...but that is me. this will now run in the background, and you now have LinuxStream ... eat it Roger Wilmut1.

fixing typos