Is iCloud Photo uploading... smart?

[ehzool]

I've been testing iCloud Photo Library recently. And my biggest concern was that having photos upload over Wi-Fi in the background as I'm trying to browse the web/watch videos... would drasticly slow down my internet.

But is iCloud uploading smart enough to recognize when someone on the network is busy doing something and will slow/stop the uploading on the iPhone?

 

[QzzB]

I cant see how an application (The iCloud Upload Engine) would know what is happening on your internet connection; If applications were monitoring what is happening (i.e. that you have iTunes streaming, web browsers on websites etc...) would be a bit of a privacy nightmare.

Also, unless macOS does a speed test all of the time, the Mac wouldn't know what your overall internet speed is (bearing in mind that the internal WiFi network will no doubt be quicker than your upload/download speed)

the only way I can see iCloud would technically know would be if it did a latency test to the iCloud server and decide if its within limits - which I don't believe it does. the only cloud syncing software I have ever seen are options to throttle upload bandwidth.

Could be wrong, might be missing something but all of the computing power it would be to monitor what all of the other apps are doing would seem pointless to me.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Yes apps can definitely be smart about how much network bandwidth they use. BackBlaze for example can be set to prioritise its use of the bandwidth to minimise impact. It's default setting is to use the whole bandwidth unless anything else is requiring it, so definitely smart.

Photos has an option to "pause for one day" which you could use if necessary, but I have never noticed any impact on normal usage. The answer might depend on how many photos you are taking every day and what your upload bandwidth is. If you are uploading hundreds of hi res raw files every day it would be different from a few dozen jpegs. My typical usage is about 6000 jpegs per year and my upload bandwidth is 12 Mbps. The photos always seem to upload very quickly, so I wouldn't expect an impact unless you had just loaded a large number and then immediately started watching a video.

I have iStat Menus in the menu bar so I can very easily see how much of my bandwidth is actually in use, but I have never thought to look while Photos was working. My guess is that it is probably smart like BackBlaze.