Apple has this magical talent of always screwing up their Cloud business. iCloud is one of the most expensive cloud storage services but still it's lacking features and is inflexible as hell. Seriously Apple, MS is offering unlimited cloud storage under $70 a year and you get MS Office as a bonus... Apple needs to stop trying and start doing.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iCloud.com Photos App Gains New Zoom, Email Features
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
iDrive is useless until it can actually be shared with someone that does not know your iCloud password.
It's actually unlimited storage now
(and you can generally get the 5 user version on amazon for under $60!)http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/27/onedrive-now-unlimited-storage-office-365-subscribers/
----------
*quickly gets off your lawn*
Apple also quietly took the opportunity to update the iCloud landing/sign-in page as well.
The webpage design was altered; things like removing the rounded box behind the credentials field, making the blur on the apps more heavy and Yosemite-like. (At some point since it went iOS 7-ified, they also changed the tick-box text from "Remember me" to "Keep me signed in".)
I think they may have also adjusted the animation that occurs when access is granted and the apps come into focus.
Additionally, there's now a storage usage indicator in the Settings app (not sure when this made an appearance, but I think it was this weekend, too).
I wonder if there were other behind-the-scenes changes made to the other web apps ?
They are? :-(
I'm not looking forward to the Photos app for Mac. I'm kinda expecting they'll be forcing the whole iCloud photo library with it and I don't want to pay to keep them all in the cloud. I want to organise and store locally, which I'm totally okay with. iPhoto does what I need.
Photo stream was cool for the most recent photos, as they're usually the one I want to have handy across devices.
Everything else can just sit on my laptop hard drive for the occasion that I'll want to look back...
I know I'm just one small fish in this very big pond, but that's my thoughts on it.
This is fine and all, but the photos app for Mac is much more of a concern. For me it's the probable lack of folders. I currently have a very organized library in aperture and I don't see apple slow using that's level of organization as it doesn't exist in iOS.
Actually that is not true at all. MS OneDrive has unlimited storage for Office 365 subscribers. That's under $70 for unlimited storage and MS Office suit.
Thankfully I bailed on aperture a few months before they announced it was relegated to the dustbin.
sometimes I swear they are deliberately withdrawing from the professional/"power user" market space. This makes me sad, as I would rather support apple than Adobe and Microsoft, but they really are not giving us (users who make a living using apple products extensively in our work) much of an option.
The writing was on the wall when they shrunk the nMP and reduced it to a proverbial clown car.
Oh well!
sometimes I swear they are deliberately withdrawing from the professional/"power user" market space. This makes me sad, as I would rather support apple than Adobe and Microsoft, but they really are not giving us (users who make a living using apple products extensively in our work) much of an option.
The writing was on the wall when they shrunk the nMP and reduced it to a proverbial clown car.
Oh well!
Given the track record of Apple's online services it will:
- take 73 days to upload all your photos
- uploading will halt for several days without any explanation, slowly driving you insane.
- the photo collection on your iPhone will be synced as well and will obviously continue to sync while you're away from your wifi network with no option to pause the process. Expect a huge bill from your phone operator.
- 94 photos will refuse to sync without any clue why or how to fix it.
- one day, all your photos will be missing only to magically return the next day. The heart attack is a bonus.
- you can upload jpg and png files, but only photos taken with the iPhoto camera are 100% compatible. Other images sometimes refuse to sync. No explanation is given, they just don't show up in iCloud. You ask yourself why.
- for 15% of your photos, no thumbnail will be generated. Your beautiful photo collection looks horrible. For days you try to make iCloud generate the missing thumbnails.
- when editing some photos, the changes will not propagate to other devices and their status will indefinitely be set to "Waiting..." The only solution is to remove and re-add those photos, but they will no longer be chronologically ordered as a result.
- some iCloud photos will show up on your iPhone but will be missing on your iPad. You don't know why and it's bugging you.
- if you want to make space, you'll have to select each photo you want to delete one by one. Then, they will moved to a "recently deleted" folder where you have to delete them again. Your deleted photos will also remain in your Photos Stream, Camera Roll and Shared Streams where you also have to delete them to make space.
After many frustrations and wasted days, you dump all your photos in Dropbox. Done.
- take 73 days to upload all your photos
- uploading will halt for several days without any explanation, slowly driving you insane.
- the photo collection on your iPhone will be synced as well and will obviously continue to sync while you're away from your wifi network with no option to pause the process. Expect a huge bill from your phone operator.
- 94 photos will refuse to sync without any clue why or how to fix it.
- one day, all your photos will be missing only to magically return the next day. The heart attack is a bonus.
- you can upload jpg and png files, but only photos taken with the iPhoto camera are 100% compatible. Other images sometimes refuse to sync. No explanation is given, they just don't show up in iCloud. You ask yourself why.
- for 15% of your photos, no thumbnail will be generated. Your beautiful photo collection looks horrible. For days you try to make iCloud generate the missing thumbnails.
- when editing some photos, the changes will not propagate to other devices and their status will indefinitely be set to "Waiting..." The only solution is to remove and re-add those photos, but they will no longer be chronologically ordered as a result.
- some iCloud photos will show up on your iPhone but will be missing on your iPad. You don't know why and it's bugging you.
- if you want to make space, you'll have to select each photo you want to delete one by one. Then, they will moved to a "recently deleted" folder where you have to delete them again. Your deleted photos will also remain in your Photos Stream, Camera Roll and Shared Streams where you also have to delete them to make space.
After many frustrations and wasted days, you dump all your photos in Dropbox. Done.
I assumed Icloud photos would replace Photo Stream.
+ I agree with you. If Photos will replace iPhoto, what happens if I have more than 5GB of photos?
It would be great to store (backup and sync) 5Gb of photos in the cloud, and have the oldest photos which exceed that limit stored locally on my Mac. Plus, organising the photos into albums straight from my phone, not having to plug it into my Mac and resyncing to the phone would be good, too.
This has been a question for me lately.
I remember being nagged by notifications during the betas, saying that my storage was full and I needed to upgrade. The popup would always reappear because of a bug in the beta, which made my iPhone nearly un-useable. I decided to turn off the new iCloud Photos option, then it took 30 days before they actually did the deletion, so the popup continued to appear for 30 days.
Right now, all I have is 1.8 GB free out of my 5 GB. I have about 36 GB of photos. Now, we're 6-8 months later, is there any added value in turning on that feature? Can I set a max to it to 1 GB of photos?
That'd be nice!
Currently, can't we have have something like 1,000 streams with 1,000 photos in each and it didn't eat up any of our iCloud storage? (and if not currently, didn't we have this 6 months ago?)
Now we're going to have to pay for that storage, right?
Gary
They simply said it will use our iCloud Document storage. I would be a little surprised if, when iCloud Photos leaves Beta, they don't increase it to 10GB or something.
I did the same thing thinking that I could share the data with my wife. Only to find out that I have to buy her 200gb as well.
What I'm really waiting for is the Mac app.
Pricing for the storage also is not that great. I wish the prices where more in line with the cloud services of the competitors.
Something along the lines of this:
20GB
Free
200GB
0.99/month
500GB
3.99/month
1TB
9.99/month
2TB
19.99/month
This doesn't make sense, it should relatively be cheaper as the capacity increases.
I agree, they should have a shared storage for family sharing. Though you can have backups go to the PC and not iCloud. Id never use iCloud for automatic backup, I find it more useful to use it as a manual cloud storage with iCloud drive. Apple just needs an iOS app to make it real useful.
What infuriates me more than anything, is the non-ability to move photos into Albums and not have them stored in the generic collections/photo section.
I'd love the ability to move photos into an album and for them to no longer have to be in the collections, and to be able to delete them from there, should I so wish.
----------
I'm sure the Mac app will be more versatile in this respect, but I can't help but wonder if Apple will cripple this functionality on OS X in an effort to synergise the two pieces of software.
I wonder if I can workaround this by using Dropbox to import the photos onto OS X, delete them from iCloud photo library and then add them as an album into Photos on the Mac.
I'd love the ability to move photos into an album and for them to no longer have to be in the collections, and to be able to delete them from there, should I so wish.
----------
I'm sure the Mac app will be more versatile in this respect, but I can't help but wonder if Apple will cripple this functionality on OS X in an effort to synergise the two pieces of software.
I wonder if I can workaround this by using Dropbox to import the photos onto OS X, delete them from iCloud photo library and then add them as an album into Photos on the Mac.
Has anyone tried to put their monolithic iPhoto Library in Dropbox? Does it sync properly across Macs?
This. It doesn't make sense that I can make a unique Apple account for each device and get 15 GB total free (5 GB per device), but if I try to use them all with one account I get penalized down to a total of 5 GB.
Shouldn't we be rewarded by buying another Apple device instead of punished?
I'm hopeful the reason is that they don't have the data center capacity yet and not that they are being stingy on purpose.
I really think it makes more sense for Apple to ship the Mac photo app first. I won't try it until they do,
iDisk was and iCloud is a bag of hurt. (Sounds familiar)
Problem with all that cloud stuff is that once you stop paying, you lose all of it.
There are benefits to the old fashioned way. ( How id we ever survive without the cloud?)
Put your stuff in DROPBOX, make an effort to clean it every once in a while, back it up = who needs the cloud?
Apple is on the outside of what is going on service wise, price wise, speed wise and the list goes on.