Use with PhotoSync app ios/mac

Can someone please give a detailed step-by-step on how to use PhotoSync app on ios/mac with Cryptomator?

I am non-technical, thus the reason for an in-depth step-by-step.

I wanted to add Cryptomator and PhotoSync to both my iPhone and mac, and have all photos running through both apps onto Apple Photos, thus securing my data whilst in transfer.

This guy does it, but I do not understand the process to set this up.

Thank you for your time.

Hi Floyed.

1st of all:

If that’s your only goal I’m afraid cryptomator is the wrong solution for you. The purpose of cryptomator is a client side encryption of files for online storages. The therefore encrypted transfer is a nice side effect, but not the purpose of the application. The files will stay encrypted on the cloud storage and are not accessible for storage provider, or their apps (like the camera roll on the iphone, or the iCloud photo viewer or anything else).

For the case I got you wrong, I read the linked article.
The guy on reddid did the following (if I understand him correctly).

He wanted to move all his existing iPhone photos (which he has formerly synced to iCloud) from the iCloud into a Cryptomator Vault and then no longer store his photos unencrypted on a cloud provider (iCloud) but only in an encrypted Cryptomator vault.
To move all (unencrypted) photos from the iPhone/iCloud to his local PC, in order to upload them again into a cryptomator vault, he recommended PhotoSync

The biggest pain was getting my optimized photos off of iCloud, I was an idiot and doing so manually and you have to wait for them to download from iCloud to your device and then to encrypt and then to upload to the cloud storage. I ended up using another app PhotoSync to grab all my media from ICloud storage and then once you’ve actually got things stored locally it’s much faster to upload.

So, (and again: if I understand him correctly) he does not use PhotoSync together with cryptomator, he use it to sync his (unencrypted) files from his cloud-storage to his local PC.
After he had stored all his existing photos into a local vault and synced his local vault with a cloud storage (in his case a webDAV storage) and thus made it available via cryptomator app on his iPhone, he deactivated the cloudsync for photos on his iPhone to stop the automatic upload of new photos to iCloud. Instead of this he manually transmits new photos via the cryptomator app directly into his vault to store them.

If you want to do the same, then you should note the following:

  1. Theres no auto-upload/sync or any other automated function in the iPhone app. You have to upload your iPhone photos manually into your vault. I’m sure there is third party software that allows an automated sync of iPhone photos with you local pc, and there is surely a setup that will then sync these photos into your vault that’s located on our PC. But this strongly depends on the third party software you want to use for this.
  2. The iPhone camera roll only works for photos that are stored on your iPhone or (unencrypted) on iCloud. If you move your photos into your cryptomator vault (and thus deleting them from iCloud and iPhone), you cannot watch these moved photos within your camera roll anymore. You have to open the cryptomator app, unlock the vault and then you can watch the photos that are stored in the vault (note: no thumbnails available yet).

PS:
Im using a pretty similar setup, but I keep my photos on the iPhone to have them in my camera roll.
From time to time I transfer new iPhone photos to my local machine (I use WiFi Photo Transfer to keep the original heic format and all meta-information) and store them in my local picture folder that is then weekly backuped into my vault.

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