iCloud Photos Downloader: Smarter Deletion Age Logic
A single pull request adds a new option letting users base the retention window for recent-photo deletion on when a photo was added to iCloud rather than when it was captured, addressing a real risk for anyone bulk-importing old scans.
Duration: PT2M8S
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: 2026-09-15T13:16:03Z
- Audio duration: PT2M8S
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 15th, 2026, and here's your iCloud Photos Downloader briefing.
Today's activity is narrow but meaningful: one pull request, but it touches a core piece of the deletion logic that keeps recent photos safe.
PR 1377, from developer dedalien, introduces a new option called "keep iCloud recent days basis," with a choice between "created" and "added." By default, nothing changes — the tool still uses a photo's capture date to decide if it's recent enough to keep. But now users can flip that to use the date the photo was…
Why does this matter? Think about someone scanning in decades-old family photos and uploading them to iCloud today. Under the old logic, those photos carry an old capture date, which means they'd look ancient to the retention check and become immediately eligible for deletion — even though they just landed in the…
The PR also includes a safety fix: if the relevant date — whether capture date or added date — is missing or malformed, the tool now skips deletion for that asset rather than guessing. That's a sensible defensive move, since acting on bad date data in a deletion workflow is exactly the kind of thing you don't want…
The change spans…
Nearby episodes from iCloud Photos Downloader
- Weekly Recap - Rethinking Auto-Delete Safety
- Auto-Delete Gets a Safety Overhaul
- 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