iCloud Photo Library not working

[hagar]

Fully knowing iCloud Photos would not work, I enabled it anyway a few weeks back. I even paid for some extra storage.

But when I open Photos on iOS I have a hundreds of blank photos. The thumbnails are missing and when clicking them, they start downloading to 25% and then just stop. (I'm amazed they actually added a little progress indicator. Never expected them to do that.)

But what's the point in having your pictures in the cloud if you cannot see them?? It's been 3 weeks so I assume no syncing is going on anymore. On OS X (my master library), everything is uploaded.

I'm more mad at myself than at Apple as I predicted these issues here several months ago. Actually, reading them back, I was spot on

Given the track record of Apple's online services it will:
- take 73 days to upload all your photos. CHECK
- uploading will halt for several days without any explanation, slowly driving you insane. CHECK
- 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. CHECK
- 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. CHECK
- 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. CHECK
- 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. CHECK

After many frustrations and wasted days, you dump all your photos in Dropbox. Done. ALMOST THERE

But instead of using Dropbox I'm now considering Flickr as it offers 100GB for free. Am I the only one with this problem? Or maybe I should wait for OS X 10.10.4 and iOS 8.4. But it goes to show that Apple really is unreliable when it comes to services.

 

[afsnyder]

Fully knowing iCloud Photos would not work, I enabled it anyway a few weeks back. I even paid for some extra storage.

But when I open Photos on iOS I have a hundreds of blank photos. The thumbnails are missing and when clicking them, they start downloading to 25% and then just stop. (I'm amazed they actually added a little progress indicator. Never expected them to do that.)

But what's the point in having your pictures in the cloud if you cannot see them?? It's been 3 weeks so I assume no syncing is going on anymore. On OS X (my master library), everything is uploaded.

I'm more mad at myself than at Apple as I predicted these issues here several months ago. Actually, reading them back, I was spot on


But instead of using Dropbox I'm now considering Flickr as it offers 100GB for free. Am I the only one with this problem? Or maybe I should wait for OS X 10.10.4 and iOS 8.4. But it goes to show that Apple really is unreliable when it comes to services.

My iCloud account was super glitched I guess since I enabled it in Beta. I switched to a knew one and its all working perfectly.

 

[hagar]

My iCloud account was super glitched I guess since I enabled it in Beta. I switched to a knew one and its all working perfectly.

I never installed any beta. Just updated from iPhoto as the majority would do.

In typical Apple fashion, there are no error messages or any indications something might be wrong.

I notice my Photo library takes 1,5GB of space on my iPad and 959MB on my iPhone. I have chosen to "Optimize Storage" instead of keeping originals.

This is how my photo library looks on my iPhone :

 

[hagar]

Just in case somebody has a similar issue (I'm surprised there aren't any), I called Apple for a fix. They suggested to close all apps and reboot the device. Apparently, one has to regularly close all iOS apps to free up ram for iCloud to function properly. This is nonsense.

Anyway, it didn't help.

They also said I have the biggest photo library they have ever seen. No way this is possible: I have 16.000 pictures, and if iCloud can't handle that??

I also tried disabling iCloud photo library. Never try that! iOS can't handle it. The switch doesn't work. I had the exact same issue with turning off iTunes Match when that feature didn't work either. iOS hates when you turn off features: it ignores the switch and keeps all the photos, and even updates them in the cloud if you edit them. Even with the switch off...

 

[Paradoxally]

I've had some issues with IPL over the past months, and this is coming from 8.1 where it was in beta and now on 8.4b3 where this feature is now (supposedly) stable - as of 8.3.

I have a library of 3.5k photos and iCloud handled them pretty well. They were all on my iPhone 5, uploaded to iCloud, no issues. Sometimes it would time out and not upload new photos, and then in those cases I just used to reboot the phone and it would upload after a while. My Mac then showed the photos too after they were all uploaded.

Recently, I got a 6+ and it had no problem getting all the photos from iCloud and generating thumbnails. It seems it's much better than it was a few months ago (well, it should be). The only problem I continue to have is that occasionally it will refuse to upload.

iPhone set to "Download Originals", Mac set to "Optimize Storage".

 

[Shirasaki]

Just in case somebody has a similar issue (I'm surprised there aren't any), I called Apple for a fix. They suggested to close all apps and reboot the device. Apparently, one has to regularly close all iOS apps to free up ram for iCloud to function properly. This is nonsense.

Anyway, it didn't help.

They also said I have the biggest photo library they have ever seen. No way this is possible: I have 16.000 pictures, and if iCloud can't handle that??

I also tried disabling iCloud photo library. Never try that! iOS can't handle it. The switch doesn't work. I had the exact same issue with turning off iTunes Match when that feature didn't work either. iOS hates when you turn off features: it ignores the switch and keeps all the photos, and even updates them in the cloud if you edit them. Even with the switch off...

Does apple force users to use their features? Is the best choice to never touch it? That is to say, if you are not sure what will go on, don't use it at all?