iPhone 12 mini iCloud photo albums and folders

[mrochester]

Hi all.

Do photo albums and folders get synced across devices? My understand is yes they do.

I recently turned off iCloud photos on my iPhone, iPad and Mac. After switching off iCloud photos on all devices I deleted all remaining photos and photo albums and folders.

What I have found is that all of my photos still exist in iCloud, but all of the albums and folders have gone.

Does anyone know what is going on and how to restore the folders/albums? I do have an exact copy of my Mac photo library on 2 different backup disks.

Many thanks.

M.

 

[hg.wells]

All the photos are stored in the main library and the photo's you put in folders / albums are just flagged they should appear in that album, otherwise you would have duplicate photos everywhere. When you delete albums the original photos are still in the library. So if you deleted a photo out of the library it would also disappear from any albums it was put in.

 

[0128672]

Hi all.

Do photo albums and folders get synced across devices? My understand is yes they do.

I recently turned off iCloud photos on my iPhone, iPad and Mac. After switching off iCloud photos on all devices I deleted all remaining photos and photo albums and folders.

What I have found is that all of my photos still exist in iCloud, but all of the albums and folders have gone.

Does anyone know what is going on and how to restore the folders/albums? I do have an exact copy of my Mac photo library on 2 different backup disks.

Many thanks.

M.

To answer your question about how to restore the albums and folders, you may need to copy the backup of your photo library to your Mac Pictures folder, and then sync your iPhone and iPad with your Mac (via the Finder on Big Sur; via iTunes in prior versions). You can sync the whole library to those devices, or select certain folders and other criteria if you want to save space on those devices.

If you disabled iCloud Photos, you should have received an Apple email notifying that you have 30 days to download your library from iCloud. When you log into iCloud.com and view your Photos, there should be a yellow banner across the top indicating how many days left out of the 30 you have to download the photos. You can disregard this completely since it sounds like you don't need to download them, and the iCloud version isn't useful to you without the albums and folder structure.

Make sense?

 

[mrochester]

So what I have done is restore my Mac photos library to a backup from earlier in the day before I made any changes. I can see all my albums and folders after doing this restore. However, the Mac is stuck on ’updating’ for over 12 hours and the files and folders have not yet appeared on my iPad or iPhone.

 

[0128672]

So what I have done is restore my Mac photos library to a backup from earlier in the day before I made any changes. I can see all my albums and folders after doing this restore. However, the Mac is stuck on ’updating’ for over 12 hours and the files and folders have not yet appeared on my iPad or iPhone.

With a large library, it's not surprising for this to take a long time uploading to iCloud, which can be quite slow. Glad you've got your structure back though.

 

[mrochester]

With a large library, it's not surprising for this to take a long time uploading to iCloud, which can be quite slow. Glad you've got your structure back though.

I restarted the Mac and opened up photos again whereby it actually did start to update.

 

[Kagio]

I got the exact same bug - it should’ve behaved as a merge, but album structure was loss, even after seeing how it was stikk there on icloud.com right before turninf sync switch back on

Almost like merge behavior on both ends happened perfectly but the album structure is an exception and for that attribute the system chose to give priority to local changes instead of merging