iPhoto to iCloud Photo Library (or Camera Roll)

[sdilley14]

Long story short, I have been massively struggling with getting iCloud Photo Library to work correctly for me (for more than a couple days).

I have all of my photos saved on a shared Photo Stream. I decided to back up all of the photos from that Photo Stream to my MacBook Pro.

From what I understand, if you download photos from your Photo Stream directly to your iOS device, the images become compressed (albeit slightly I believe). But if you download from Photo Stream to your Mac, the images maintain "full" quality.

So now that I have all of my "full quality" images backed up on my Mac, I want to move them to iCloud Photo Library. My hope is that I will upload them all to IPL, turn on "optimization" on my iPhone, and IPL will "beam down" optimized versions of the photos to my iPhone.

If this isn't possible at this time, is there any way I can move the photos from my Mac to my iPhone, then turn on IPL and upload the images to IPL from there? I imported all of my photos on my mac via iPhoto, so I'm not sure if the images are accessible individually in a folder somewhere, or if you have to operate from within iPhoto? Maybe I can access the folder all the images are stored in and AirDrop them to my iPhone?

Here is another thread I had started a while ago that further details my IPL struggles, ironically titled "IPL issues resolved", lol.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1815416/

 

[sdilley14]

Well, I just ended up taking all of my photos from iPhoto and transferring them to my iPhone via Air Drop (which worked very quickly and smoothly BTW).

I enabled iCloud Photo Library on my phone so I have an online backup of my photos, but I'm not going to bother with the whole "optimize" thing at this point. It has been too much of a headache. My photo library only takes up about 350MB - I can deal with giving up that space on my phone for now.

I deleted my Photo Stream as well. Between my Camera Roll, IPL, and Photo Stream, it just became too many sources to manage. From now on I am just going to keep my photos stored locally on my phone and back them up in iPhoto from time to time just to be safe. I may try the whole "optimize" thing in IPL once it loses the "Beta" tag, but until then I'm not going to mess with it anymore.