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Using Linux to access iPhone’s photos located in Mac’s Photo Stream

Background:

Photos taken by iPhone have been automatically distributed to varioius devices, Mac and even MS Windows through Photo Stream, but how to get these from my OpenSuse? Mac OSX is supposed to have the ability to enable Windows file share using Samba. Actually, I am not familiar with setting up Windows share in Mac, thus tried to using NFS which is natural to Linux.

Issues:

  1. Where is the folder location of Photo Stream?
  2. How to properly set NFS server in Mac and NFS client in Linux?

Solutions:

  1. Using Finder in Mac OSX is not easy to get the Photo Stream folder. Actually it is located in ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssestManagement/assets/sub/
  2. Using NFS Manager for Mac does not help too much, thus using basic skill to modify (if not created yet) /etc/exports. This requires root access with appropriate command in terminal. After each modification of the /etc/exports file, need to run “nfsd restart” to ensure the changes in /etc/exports are applied to NFS server.

Tricks:

  1. The photos are NOT stored in one folder, instead they are each stored in one folder, i.e. there are same amount of folders in ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssestManagement/assests/sub/ as the number of photos. Also, the folder names seems to contain no information of the photos.
  2. NFS mount with the owner as 501, but my user id in OpenSuse is 500, thus need to change the permissions of the folders from Library to sub as 755 so as to let user 500 to access the photos. There may be argument why not using VNC client to access Mac. Yes, but it will be better response and no need to kick off one more application in the client while using NFS.

Config:

  • NFS Server: Mac OSX 10.8.2
  • NFS Client: OpenSuse 12.2 (x86_64)