Long-term experience with iCloud Photo Library?

[keaide]

Hi there.
I am thinking using iCloud Photo Library to manage/sync my photos (more expensive than other services, but well-integrated). What's your long-term experience with it? Does it run smooth? I have heard that the initial uploading process is quite slow. But that would be fine since it is a one-time setup.
My library is about 120GB and will grow by about 6-10GB per year, so the 200GB storage plan will do. I think that's a library size iCloud still can handle well (?)
Thanks.

 

[jmmo20]

i've been using it since it came out as a public beta.. a few teething issues but in my opinion it runs great.

I would like a little more control. Some issues I have

1) I don't have control over what is downloaded or not. Sometimes I would like a button to "wipe out" all thumbnails and local high res copies

2) You can't turn it off if you have bad wifi. For example I've flown with Norwegian Air shuttle several times, and wifi is free.. as soon as you connect to wifi and take a picture on board, the phone begins uploading to icloud. It actually kills the connection and I can only imagine 50 iphones doing the same on the same journey.

3) Album management needs to improve dramatically

 

[richwoodrocket]

I like the idea in theory, but it's terrible in actual implementation. Sometimes the photos fail to load, which means I can't even share a photo and there's no fix. The photo picker in messages fails to work, and the same in other apps. As soon as the photo goes into the cloud, the phone treats it like its not there.
Unfortunately I have around 7gb of photos in iCloud now, which is far too much to be able to download to my iphone.

 

[keaide]

Thanks for your replies. It sounds a bit like the typical all-or-nothing Apple approach. When you're in you just have to kind of surrender to their way. But it looks like they're not yet totally ready for prime time with this one. However, as it is with other apple products... it's still tempting.

BTW: Assuming I have set up the iCloud library with my Macbook and uploaded my 120GB library to iCloud from there, can I just copy the local iCloud library over to the iMac and iCloud will recognize that all the pictures are already "there" or do I need to download the entire 120GB (full-size originals) to the iMac from iCloud again in order to make this thing work?

 

[brandscill]

I've been using it for about a year now and it works great, no issues here.

 

[zhenya]

No serious problems here with the sync. Been using it from the beginning. Makes it MUCH easier to keep photos in sync across devices.

Wish there were better tools for integrating with the rest of my family, however (although this applies to all of iCloud, really).

 

[hatuko]

The only problem I've had with it is that my iPhone's run out of space a few times because of it, but it only has 16GB and some big apps as well.

 

[keaide]

Don't tell me that it works well, because this would just convince me to give it a try...

But I am still wondering about if I can just copy my local library from the MacBook to the iMac. Will iCloud recognize that this is the same library it has synced already or will it insist to download the pictures from iCloud again?

 

[brandscill]

Don't tell me that it works well, because this would just convince me to give it a try...

But I am still wondering about if I can just copy my local library from the MacBook to the iMac. Will iCloud recognize that this is the same library it has synced already or will it insist to download the pictures from iCloud again?

Really not sure sorry but it doesn't sound unreasonable. It might still upload to figure it all out though.

 

[keaide]

Really not sure sorry but it doesn't sound unreasonable. It might still upload to figure it all out though.

Ouch! This sounds like a lot of potential up- and downloading when reinstalling the system or setting up new hardware... I hope that Photos is smart enough to just compare a set of IDs or fingerprints or do some Cupertino magic to figure out what's up to date and what not.