ashayas/icloud-s3
An S3-compatible object store backed by iCloud Shared Photo Albums. Quota policy: Apple's Shared Album loophole.
From the publisher
README & documentation
Source previewRead the project’s overview, installation instructions and usage examples. The original README is the source of truth.
Apple gives every iCloud account 5 GB of free storage, then charges monthly for iCloud+. However, Apple's published iCloud Shared Albums policy states that photos and videos in Shared Albums do not count against your iCloud storage. An Apple ID can create 200 Shared Albums, each holding 5,000 photos up to 2048×2048 pixels. A lossless 2048×2048 24-bit RGB PNG holds 12.18 MB of raw pixel data. That is up to 1,000,000 objects (12 TB of raw capacity) stored at 0 bytes of iCloud Drive quota. icloud-s3 is a Rust server that speaks the Amazon S3 XML REST protocol (aws s3, boto3, rclone, s5cmd) and stores every object inside the RGB pixels of lossless PNG carrier images in Shared Albums. Each image has a 64-pixel visual HUD banner burned into the top so your production database backups are readable when you scroll past them in Photos.app. Point the unmodified AWS CLI…
Read the full README ↗ · Preview checked 2026-11-01T12:49:37.746Z
Inside the original README — Document outline
- iCloudS3
- Install & Quick Start
- Connect it to Shared Albums / macOS Photos
- How it works
- Evals & Benchmarks
- 1. S3 Conformance & Pixel Integrity Evals (10/10 PASS)
- 2. RGB PNG Carrier Throughput (Apple Silicon, --release)
- 3. Shared Album Sharding (--shards 1 vs --shards 8)
- 4. Cold Restart Replay from Shared Album PNGs
- 5. Live Head-to-Head Comparison: icloud-s3 vs Cloudflare R2 (10 Photos + 1 ZIP Bundle)
- Summary vs. Cloud Object Stores (10–300 KB Objects)
- What a Carrier Photo Looks Like
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What this repository does
An S3-compatible object store backed by iCloud Shared Photo Albums. Quota policy: Apple's Shared Album loophole.
Repository facts
- Owner
- ashayas
- Primary language
- Rust
- Stars
- 367
- Forks
- 25
- Open issues + pull requests
- 0
- License
- Not reported — inspect the license file
- Archived
- No
- Default branch
- main
- Created
- 2026-10-30T23:54:20.000Z
- Last push
- 2026-10-31T01:34:42.000Z
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