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Microsoft Begins Rolling Out iCloud Photos Integration on Windows 11

Mr. Dee said:
Its probably too costly, they have enough trouble as it is maintaining apps for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS.
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Apple barely managed to put out a useable version of iTunes on Windows before they even launched the iPhone. It was a terrible experience in 2007.
 
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realeric said:
Apple need to fix the quality issue in iCloud photo. The photos in icloud is not the same with in iPhone. It’s degraded.
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You'll need to select photos, click the dotdotdot icon, top-right, and select "More download options..." and choose "Unmodified original"
 
krspkbl said:
microsoft doing apples work for them.

the icloud app is a joke on windows. tried using it and it's such a mess. takes forever for photos to download, upload, sync. don't even get me started on trying to use it to save documents to or access existing ones in icloud.

apple is building all these services and i get they want people to buy their macs but them ignoring windows users is the wrong thing to do.

i'd like to use my icloud storage to sync files between my pc and iphone but it doesn't work well. to be fair, the icloud website works and they are updating it so it's not too bad.

i wanted to join apple music but they expect me to use iTunes or their buggy web player which logs me out all the time or sometimes refuses to play anything. i know there is the third party cider app but that's a buggy mess too (and the dev is a horrible person).

if apple want to compete with spotify they need to do much better. on windows if i want to sync to cloud i'll just use one drive or google or dropbox.

apple are stretching themselves too thin and or simply not interested in letting people out their mac/ios bubble. again i get that but as long as that is their approach they will not be able to compete with others. windows user base is huge and that's a lot of money they are missing out on.

they need to take windows more seriously.
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Apple is good at ignoring large OS platforms like Windows and Android, so I just ignore them back LOL.
 
drkrleitch said:
Apple is good at ignoring large OS platforms like Windows and Android, so I just ignore them back LOL.
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I’m not sure it’s about ignoring, it’s about prioritising. Apples efforts are best placed in their own platforms that they themselves control.
 
Definitely a welcome change, and its something that will make my life a lot easier, since I use both PCs and Macs.
 
gco212 said:
Apple barely managed to put out a useable version of iTunes on Windows before they even launched the iPhone. It was a terrible experience in 2007.
Click to expand...
I don't know why people consider iTunes as terrible, was there anything better before that? Because the last I checked, if you wanted to get music on your iPod, your only option was that. Considering I used it as a Windows user for many years, it was the only way I could download apps outside of the App Store on the iPod Touch, sync my photos, Outlook contacts, music and videos. And it did a pretty good job at it too. Windows had no actual built in way to do this back in 2009 and they intentionally refused to because they were still trying to compete with Apple.

What made iTunes annoying was numerous updates. I got sick of seeing the Apple software update utility, but outside of that, the program wasn't a problem and did what it intended. How long did the Rio, Nomad Creative, Zune last.
 
Last night I did a full reset and restore of our 2019 i5/500GB SSD/40GB RAM (self-upgraded from 8GB) 27" iMac and man is it snappy.

Of course it should be given it's only 3 years old but I've spent the last year on my M1 Pro 14" MPB and M1 12.9" iPad and mentally had fallen into the trap of thinking these are SOOOO much faster than Intel variants, which of course 90% of the time they're not.
 
Mr. Dee said:
I don't know why people consider iTunes as terrible, was there anything better before that? Because the last I checked, if you wanted to get music on your iPod, your only option was that. Considering I used it as a Windows user for many years, it was the only way I could download apps outside of the App Store on the iPod Touch, sync my photos, Outlook contacts, music and videos. And it did a pretty good job at it too. Windows had no actual built in way to do this back in 2009 and they intentionally refused to because they were still trying to compete with Apple.

What made iTunes annoying was numerous updates. I got sick of seeing the Apple software update utility, but outside of that, the program wasn't a problem and did what it intended. How long did the Rio, Nomad Creative, Zune last.
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iTunes has been and remains a horrible application. I've been using it on Mac and Windows since the first iPod was released and it has sucked all along. Performance, UI - none of it worked well and it was always a mystery why.

Sure it was better than nothing, but so is a hole in the ground when you're stuck in a blizzard. But eventually that hole in the ground needs to get some creature comforts and iTunes never really improved at all.
 
torontotim said:
iTunes has been and remains a horrible application. I've been using it on Mac and Windows since the first iPod was released and it has sucked all along. Performance, UI - none of it worked well and it was always a mystery why.

Sure it was better than nothing, but so is a hole in the ground when you're stuck in a blizzard. But eventually that hole in the ground needs to get some creature comforts and iTunes never really improved at all.
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That's not my experience, it works fine for me.
 
gco212 said:
Apple barely managed to put out a useable version of iTunes on Windows before they even launched the iPhone. It was a terrible experience in 2007.
Click to expand...
Not much better now 😆

Even on a high end system with a Ryzen 5950x/5800X3D, Nvidia 4090 and running of a gen 4 nvme SSD it's a slow lagging mess.

One of the worst programs I have ever used and it's been a piece of crap for 10+ years over many different hardware builds and different versions of Windows.
 
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gco212 said:
Apple barely managed to put out a useable version of iTunes on Windows before they even launched the iPhone. It was a terrible experience in 2007.
Click to expand...
I remember having a new PC back then and it would blue screen whenever I would play a video on iTunes but I needed to keep it installed because I had a iPod Classic.
 
Mr. Dee said:
I don't know why people consider iTunes as terrible, was there anything better before that? Because the last I checked, if you wanted to get music on your iPod, your only option was that. Considering I used it as a Windows user for many years, it was the only way I could download apps outside of the App Store on the iPod Touch, sync my photos, Outlook contacts, music and videos. And it did a pretty good job at it too. Windows had no actual built in way to do this back in 2009 and they intentionally refused to because they were still trying to compete with Apple.

What made iTunes annoying was numerous updates. I got sick of seeing the Apple software update utility, but outside of that, the program wasn't a problem and did what it intended. How long did the Rio, Nomad Creative, Zune last.
Click to expand...
There were a lot of terrible design decisions made with iTunes for Windows. Some didn't affect home users at all. (EG. iTunes defaulted to storing someone's content and settings under their Windows "roaming profile" on a domain joined corporate network. The roaming profile was designed so each time you logged in with your corporate domain login and password, it would pull down your Windows preferences like custom wallpaper and icon placement on your desktop. It was supposed to be a small enough amount of data so your sign-in wouldn't take too long as it downloaded it in the background. With someone's large, and ever changing, iTunes library in there? Now the roaming profile might be 120GB in size or more and take unacceptably long to get you logged into your PC!)

I remember working at one company where we had to enforce customized Windows "group polices" to prevent iTunes from saving data there. So it was fixable, but just an unnecessary extra problem Apple created.

iTunes for Windows also installed a number of components needed to make it work. It wasn't so much an application as a framework with a bunch of associated pieces. That made the updating or uninstalling process more complex than necessary, and also made the program launch slowly.
 
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brofkand said:
I just updated - not as good as it could be. It's purely a view-only system. You can't edit the photos and sync your changes back to iCloud.

It's better than it was though. So there's that. Maybe it'll improve as time goes on.

iCloud in general needs an entire rewrite, it's really died on the vine in my view. They've bolted on new features here and there but nothing is a killer app and mostly they exist just to make you pay for more storage.
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Does it work better than Explorer? I've done the existing icloud sync to Explorer and it takes forever for the thumbnails to load, to the point that it's basically unusable.
 
When I delete a picture in Photos app in windows, it doesn't delete in icloud, however what if I choose to want to re-download again? I cannot seem to find a way to do this other than turning off photos in icloud for windows and back on again.
 
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How is iCloud Drive on Windows 11? I would like to try it again but have had too many bad experiences with it. iCloud.com works great! However, a real working Windows App for iCloud with Dropbox reliability would be even better.
Any experience with this new version and iCloud Drive?
 
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It is working fine. I like the photos integration, but I also have a problem that photos are in the wrong chronological order and I haven't managed to make it work right.
 
nampat said:
It is working fine. I like the photos integration, but I also have a problem that photos are in the wrong chronological order and I haven't managed to make it work right.
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Yep, still not in chronological order for me either. Hopefully Microsoft have a bug fix on the way.
 
This experience has been quite neat! It really adds a decent integration with Windows. I set it up on my HP, and it's working nice so far. The only issue I wonder is if this will still be supported on the new End to end encryption scheme. I wonder if that will break this or not.
 
ian87w said:
This experience has been quite neat! It really adds a decent integration with Windows. I set it up on my HP, and it's working nice so far. The only issue I wonder is if this will still be supported on the new End to end encryption scheme. I wonder if that will break this or not.
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Are your photos showing in correct chronological order?
 
ian87w said:
This experience has been quite neat! It really adds a decent integration with Windows. I set it up on my HP, and it's working nice so far. The only issue I wonder is if this will still be supported on the new End to end encryption scheme. I wonder if that will break this or not.
Click to expand...
How is the iCloud Drive functionality for files on Windows?
 
tekfranz said:
How is the iCloud Drive functionality for files on Windows?
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So far I only use iCloud Photos since I have OneDrive for my files.
Having said that, seems like it should be seamless, at least according to Apple's support page. Looks like it should work like OneDrive on Windows, aka everything is listed in File Explorer, but can be downloaded on demand.

View, add, or remove iCloud Drive files in iCloud for Windows

With iCloud for Windows, work with your iCloud Drive files and folders directly on your Windows computer.
support.apple.com

I do wonder how these would work if you enable the new end to end encryption.
 
nampat said:
It is working fine. I like the photos integration, but I also have a problem that photos are in the wrong chronological order and I haven't managed to make it work right.
Click to expand...
I just update iCloud client and it seems taht photos are in right order now.
 
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