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iCloud photos is garbage

S

stevemiller

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Oct 27, 2008
2,065
1,637
Uploaded my photos from my phone, then iCloud started having connectivity issues. Troubleshooting recommended signing out and back in to iCloud. Upon signing back in, iCloud wants to sync duplicates of all my photos, and there isn't enough space and so I no longer have iCloud access.

Now new photos taken on my phone won't get added to iCloud. And new photos added to iCloud from other devices won't show up on my phone. Essentially iCloud is creating a useless mess.
 
Another example of why I don't trust photos to the cloud. Photos from my phone and iPad are backed up to the computer and all photos backed up to external drive and DVD''s. Too many things can go wrong when you trust your back-up to others.
 
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Its on topic in the sense that apple tries to encourage the use of these cloud services but doesn't plan them out very well at all. Over. and Over.

I feel like my iCloud photos library is now kinda held hostage because I can't use it with my phone unless I upgrade to paid storage, even though I have 2gb free on iCloud, and the 2+ gb it THINKS it needs is for duplicate photos that are ALREADY in the cloud.

(ps i'm explicitly telling my phone NOT to include photos in my regular backup, which it shouldn't do anyway, and the phone backup is like 300mb total)
 
Turn off iCloud Photo Library on your devices, then delete all photos via iCloud.com. Then re-enable on devices. Hopefully everything will sync as normal. Or do what I did and switch to Google Photos :)
 
Paco II, good advice thank you! I've already started with Google photos, and may well just not bother with iCloud anymore, as that whole delete and start from scratch approach feels like a lot of work and upload bandwidth for a service that seems to have frequent issues.

ICloud in general has frequently flaked out on me for handoff and continuity so I'm not really optimistic photos will be much more reliable.
 
My experiences with iCloud in general have been good. Not so with iCloud Photo Library, which I tried really hard to like, but found to be very flakey. I wanted to keep using it but Google Photos is just far superior when it comes to finding photos.

stevemiller said:
Paco II, good advice thank you! I've already started with Google photos, and may well just not bother with iCloud anymore, as that whole delete and start from scratch approach feels like a lot of work and upload bandwidth for a service that seems to have frequent issues.

ICloud in general has frequently flaked out on me for handoff and continuity so I'm not really optimistic photos will be much more reliable.
Click to expand...
 
Sorry to hear you guys have been having trouble. I have been using iCloud Photo Library from the start and enjoy the service trouble free. I did buy additional space and currently keep about 30GB of photos and videos. In your backup settings, no need to switch off photos it will clear that for you as it goes through the upload process and completes a few backups. It will still be there in your device backup options but shows 0 space used. iCloud Photo Library will make a new entry for itself in the Settings/iCloud space on your device.

It should not sync duplicates but as suggested, if you still have all of the full size photos on your device you could clear iCloud Photos and let it run through the process again or just let it sync and clear the duplicates. If you're still using the default 5GB of space for everything then you should be able to do this pretty quick since that is a small amount of data.
 
that happened to me as well on my mac. i had 4000 pics already uploaded but i had to disable iCloud to check sth and when i enabled it again it tried to upload all those 4000 pics again. what i did was disable cloud again. delete all the pics from my lobrary enabled it again and instead of uploading it now downloaded the pics again. their algo seems to have issues with spotting duplicates but i am not really surprised. it never really worked with songs on iatunes Match to this day either
 
Thanks bushido I might give that a try, although I don't have a ton of faith in the problem not recurring over and over if they have no mechanism to prevent library duplication.
 
My issues with IPL were many: iOS syncing constantly getting stuck, poor search capabilities (compared to GP), and the amount of space it would take on my iOS devices even with optimize settings enabled.
 
I find Google photos far superior and unlimited storage as well if the pictures are below a certain resolution.
 
I just signed up this past Sunday on the 200GB plan. I have my pics in folders divided by years so I'm just dragging and dropping by year into Photos. I just do one year, let it upload, make a few albums, do some faces, then start another year.

Smooth experience so far. But Google Photos is clearly better with its machine learning capability. I'll be using that as my secondary. Flickr is my 3rd copy and offsite backup.
 
Is anyone using Google Drive to keep local copies of their Google Photos? I'm curious how they are organized in Drive.
 
I may after my year of Dropbox is up in January...But if it doesn't have selective folders, it may be a no go. I have many pictures I keep (professional photos, reference photos, etc.) that I won't want showing up in my "family photo library".

Dropbox has this selective folder feature via Carousel, but Carousel has no search feature. Arrgh!

Carousel has a great time feature, but no way for me to print, make slideshows. Arrgh!

Google Photos has great search, but no flashback feature like Carousel. Arrgh!

Google Photos has plenty of free space like Flickr, but compresses your files. Arrrgh!

Flickr has 1TB of space, but doesn't do much with your files like Google Photos so they basically just sit there. Arrgh!

Apple has Faces, but I have to do all the clicking myself instead of automatic like Google Photos. Arrrgh!

It's like these photo services have one or two features, but not the others, forcing me to use a few apps to achieve what I want. ICL is the best combination since I can organize, backup, print, make slideshows, make books, make screensavers for my Apple TV's, search Faces and Places, and gives me plenty of space that I'm willing to pay for. I really do hope Apple takes a page from Google and starts machine learning on photos, but I'm afraid they are just too far behind in this area since apparently that project took Google several years before it launched. In the meantime, Google will be my 2nd choice, Flickr as my 3rd backup.
 
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