iCloud Photos Downloader: Auto-Delete Gets a Safety Overhaul
A single pull request, number 1375, redesigns how the tool decides what to delete, moving from filename guesswork to stable asset identity and adding multiple fail-closed safeguards. The change directly targets issue 511 and touches the core delete logic, manifest handling, and configuration options.
Duration: PT2M5S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from iCloud Photos Downloader.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: iCloud Photos Downloader
- Published: 2026-09-06T13:13:22Z
- Audio duration: PT2M5S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning. It's September 6th, and today's briefing centers on one significant pull request touching the heart of this tool's most dangerous feature: deleting your photos.
Pull request 1375, from julme, reworks auto-delete from the ground up. The headline change: the tool now tracks files by the stable iCloud photo asset ID, rather than trying to reconstruct which local file matches which cloud photo using filename and date guesswork. That's a meaningful reliability fix.…
The bigger theme here is "fail closed." Before this change, ambiguous situations could potentially still result in a deletion. Now, an asset only becomes eligible for removal after two consecutive complete scans of the active library confirm it's gone, and it also has to show up in Recently Deleted. On top of that,…
For anyone who's used or reviewed the auto-delete feature, this is the update to know. It directly answers longstanding concerns tracked in issue 511 about accidental or incorrect deletions. The trade-off is conservatism: the tool will now sometimes choose to do nothing rather than risk deleting the wrong thing,…
There's also a new configuration option, an auto-delete directory setting, giving users…
Wh…
Nearby episodes from iCloud Photos Downloader
- Weekly Recap - A Quiet Fix With Real-World Impact
- Fixing Filename-Only Mode
- Weekly Recap - Resilience for Large Library Scans
- Resumable Scan Checkpoints
- Weekly Recap - Fixing Account Compatibility at the Source
- Fixing Migrated Library Detection
- Weekly Recap - Bringing Shared Albums Into the Fold
- Shared Albums Return