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Does anyone have a HUGE iCloud Photos Library? How is the performance?

N

NazgulRR

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2010
423
83
I've got about 400GB / 60,000 items that I am thinking about uploading to iCloud*. Has anyone gone "all-in" with a similar amount of data?

I've got a Macbook Air 128GB, iPhone 6 64GB and iPad Mini 2 16GB that would all run an optimised library.

I am interested in what the performance is like across different devices for an optimized library - both OSX & iOS. I'm currently playing around with a smaller, cca 10GB library to see how it works, but I am curious if the performance would be the same with a library 40x bigger.

Questions:
How is scrolling? Searching? Smooth? Opening photos/videos from within 3rd party apps? Do videos stream as they load or do you have to wait for them to download fully first? Do they download in full quality if the setting is to keep an optimized library?

*I do intend to keep and maintain at least two local copies of all my data on external drives.
 
Anyone?

I am definitely curious about the iCloud Photo Library optimized performance on A7/A8 iOS devices with a couple of 10,000 photos...
 
I have 22,000 + pics/video as a combo. Performance will go as followed: Your initial "Upload/download" will take forever. My network is 150mb/s down, 120mb/s up. It took about 2 days of use on the new 2015 rMBP. On iOS devices, it takes a bit as well. Now, performance wise depends on your option, you can save locally or have a "snapshot" essentially. I have local on my iOS devices (all 128gb) and snapshot on my Mac. I would reverse, but I have a lot going on the mac. The only problem i have with the snapshot portion it can take a bit to view selected material. The snapshot that is stored, will give a less of a resolution for a photo, and will take a bit to play a video depending on length and speed of current network. The photo will resolve to its full resolution once you download it. Same with iOS. I figure I'm out more with iOS devices, so I'll save locally, performance is amazing. Again, for it to save locally, will take a LONG LONG time.

Your main factors are this: network speed and storage. If you have the space, and the speed, save locally. Otherwise, do the optimize storage. Remember that you'll need a network access to view the latter of the option for full quality.

Hope this helps, cheers!
 
P.S., Save all photos/videos to external with usb 3.0 if your mac supports. 3rd party apps can take a bit, it all relies on Photos for now sadly. Scrolling is okay if you save it locally. Otherwise, you can see a bunch of blurs and thumbnails attempting to resolve its image. Videos will stream in increments of I found about 25% (again depends on speed of network, if local it plays beautifully).
 
Hi. Thank you for your feedback.

I've been running a test 4,000 item / 10GB iCloud Photos Library for a few months now and the performance of the optimised library is definitely satisfactory/smooth on both Mac on iOS devices with this size. I am fine with the additional wait needed for full-res photos and videos. Hopefully Apple add a youtube-like stream capabilities for the video in the future.

Anyway, I was curious if having a library with 10-15x the amount of items slows it down considerably on iOS devices. I would be uploading a further 40,000 items / cca 360GB of data from a (headless) Mac Mini Server that is 24/7 on a 100mb/s down, 20mb/s up line. I'm fine with the upload process even if it takes a couple of weeks (it shouldn't with that upload speed though).

The Mac Mini Server would be the only Mac with the full size library, the rest - my daily drivers Macbook Air, iPhone 6, iPad Mini 2 - would be the optimised versions of the cca. 40,000 items / 360GB (pics/videos combo).

Obviously the initial download of the smaller size thumbnails would take a looong time, but is the wait worth?
 
I believe the wait is worth it. I'm looking at dumping hockey photos and more family photos in, and at that point, look into optimizing local storage. I do get some lag here and there, it seems even smoother on my iOS 9 beta device, I may eventually just organize further in albums and have a select few albums in Photos and have my master collection saved in multiple locations (I use Plex as well, and had decent luck obtaining the pictures from my Plex server channel)
 
I use albums a lot - 99.9% of my photos/videos are in albums with some in more than one albums at a time so I am sure I would escape the need for endless scrolling/possible lag this way :).

I'm actually using Plex too. With the new iOS update from a few days ago the browsing is GREAT - and the iOS client side is suuuuper smooth with a 20,000 item library, however, there is 1) no support for OSX Photos libraries (coming in the future perhaps?), 2) supports photos only - no videos and 3) albums=Finder folders, which means I have to duplicate files on my hard drive if I want them to show up in different albums.
 
sorry for the delay! i'm only on forums at work :p i bet there will be os x support soon, they have to be getting hammered for support with Photos/vids. I've had luck just using my time capsule as the server itself and host all my personal videos in a separate folder/channel.
 
robgendreau said:
Check https://tidbits.com/article/15745 the downsides of using Apple's service. Might help you avoid potential problems if you have to use iCloud Photo Library.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. Was interesting to read that and their other related pages to the Photos app too. Most of the concerns seem to be around bandwidth, which I wouldn't have a problem with (although the tip on throttling the upload was super helpful!). However, one of the commentators says this:

"Excellent article; many thanks. I have combined several libraries and now have one with ~115,000 pictures and ~1,500 videos. Works well on a Mac laptop with Photos and via a browser at icloud.com. On an iPhone, taking a photograph works, but then the camera function is frozen and the picture taken does not show on the phone Photos for some minutes or hours. Plus other oddities. Has anyone else seen this? Fixes?"

Hmmmm...is anyone else experience something like this? chri5dub12?
 
I'll preface this to say that I don't use Photos/iPhoto to look over photos much (sic: ever) and use it 99.9% for archiving media from my iPhone. Anything else goes into respective sub-directories in my main Pictures folder (i.e., photos from a gig or something funny from the internet, and I also have a bunch of screenshots).

My library is 67GBs and counting! It's a bit laggy sometimes but given the size of said library, it's completely practical to be a bit slow every now and then. I have the library saved on an external drive since it quickly took up way too much space on my machine. Scrolling is smooth, and importing media to it (from my iPhone, which is all I use it for) is also smooth. I don't use iCloud Photo Library because I simply prefer to have everything local and handled under my jurisdiction only.
 
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