P-Pass

P-Pass copies the photos and videos on your iPhone to a Mac in your home. They arrive as the original files, in a folder you choose, and open with a double-click. Every phone paired with that computer shares one library, so the family can browse what the others have backed up. What you need • A Mac with Apple silicon running the P-Pass desktop app, which is open source and available from p-pass.hawkeye-xb.com. • The computer switched on while backup runs. While it is off, photos wait on the phone and go across once it is back. Setting it up Install the desktop app and pick the folder that will hold your photos; it then shows a QR code. Scan the code with P-Pass on your iPhone, confirm the pairing on the computer, and choose which albums to back up. On the phone • One line shows how many photos are on the phone, how many are backed up and how many are still to go, along with the time of the last successful backup. • The Photos tab browses the whole family library on the computer. A photo from there can be saved back to this phone. • Notifications cover four cases: pairing lost, photo access changed, Background App Refresh turned off, and a backup that failed. A successful backup is silent. • If iCloud Photos is set to Optimize iPhone Storage, P-Pass downloads each full-size original during backup, sends it to the computer and then deletes the temporary copy. How backup runs on iPhone P-Pass backs up the whole time the app is open, so the simplest way to catch up is to open it. With background backup turned on, iOS decides whether and when it can continue after you leave the app. The next run picks up where the last one stopped, and nothing is sent twice. Backup needs Full Access to your photo library. With Limited Access, photos outside your selection are not backed up. Where your photos go Photos are encrypted all the way from the phone to your computer, and the project runs no server that stores them. When the two devices cannot connect directly, the encrypted data goes through a relay run by number 0, the maintainers of the open-source networking library P-Pass is built on. The relay forwards the data without storing it. Deleting a photo on the phone leaves the copy on the computer in place; backup only ever adds. The library lives on that one computer, so for a second copy, copy the folder to another drive. Privacy P-Pass collects no data. The app contains no analytics, advertising or tracking. Source code The code is on GitHub: github.com/hawkeye-xb/P-Pass.