iCloud Biff

Periodically scan a public iCloud shared photo library, and send an email with the thumbnails of any photos/videos that are new since the last time the program was run.

Usage

Easiest is to use the NixOS - just include the flake's overlay and nixosModule, and then configure something like:

services.icloud-biff = {
    enable = true;
    album-name = "My awesome photos";
    album-id = "T0vXgdFERSurw2c";
    recipient-email-addrs = [
        "[email protected]"
        "[email protected]"
    ];
    sender-email-addr = "[email protected]";
    sender-email-name = "Helpful Photo Update Robot";
};

The only things to watch are the album-id (which is the string of characters at the end of the URL for the shared photo library) and that the receipient email addresses are just the address bit, not names. (eg Not This Bit <[email protected]>).

By default this runs the daemon every hour, but this is configurable with the interval property.

Non-NixOS

Building

If using Nix, then nix build. If you also have Cachix, then cachix use simonchatts gives you access to the binaries pre-built by GitHub (x86_64 linux/macOS).

Otherwise cargo build --release.

Deploying

Create a configuration JSON file like the above, but without enable = true; and with the path to a read-write JSON file that can be used to store state. For example:

{
    "album-name": "My awesome photos",
    "album-id": "T0vXgdFERSurw2c",
    "recipient-email-addrs": [
        "[email protected]",
        "[email protected]"
    ],
    "sender-email-addr": "[email protected]",
    "sender-email-name": "Helpful Photo Update Robot",
    "db-file": "/var/lib/some-file-i-have-read-write-access-to.json"
}

Then run icloud-biff <path-to-json-file> (as frequently as you want, with appropriate userid etc).

Implementation

This was originally written as an async app, with parallel thumbnail fetching. It turns out that including thumbnail images in the email is a bad idea though - most email clients not only don't display them, but actively categorise the message as definitely spam.

So now the email's HTML message body refers to the thumbnail images on the iCloud servers as remote requests, and there isn't anything the program can usefully do in parallel any more. So it's just synchronous. (The HTTP requests still use an async library, but blocking immediately.)