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ipodlover77

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 17, 2009
1,376
406
Hello,

Does anybody know how to move existing photos from an existing library that is located on the computer to iCloud Photo Library?

I thought maybe if I sync my phone with the specific events i want from the comp. located iphoto library, it'll upload to the cloud.

Or does only new photos or photos that were taken from the devices get uploaded and not photos that are in a iphoto library.
 
Hmmmm...

I was just contemplating this. I suppose if you upload via iTunes to your phone/tablet then let the syncing take over from there. Might be worth a try...
 
Just wait until the "Photos" app for OSX comes out in Oct, I'm certain it will have migration tools from iPhoto to Photos.
 
Ok... Then: "Just wait until the "Photos" app for OSX comes out in 2015, I'm certain it will have migration tools from iPhoto to Photos."
 
So what do we do until then ? Twiddle our thumbs?

Until then? Continue using iPhoto as is. I know I'll be spending some time to really clean up my iPhoto library before the transition.

Or you can use iPhone as usual with iPhoto and not enable iCloud Photo Library yet (since they have gone and labelled it Beta).
 
What I did was to copy paste them to a folder in my desktop from iPhoto.

Then airdropped them to my phone.
 
What I did was to copy paste them to a folder in my desktop from iPhoto.

Then airdropped them to my phone.

I guess one could also use the SD card attachment for iOS devices and start loading them into the library that way.
 
What I have done is gone into iPhoto on my Mac and created Shared Photo Streams for the pictures I want access to in IOS 8. I am not going to go back and try to copy over all my pictures to iCloud Photo even after Photos is available on Yosemite. But I am backing up all my photos on iCloud Drive.
 
I have about 5000 pictures on iPhoto on my Mac, now that I'm using the 200 gb iCloud Drive plan, I would like to be able to see them all on all my iOS devices. How do I send them to iCloud? Do I drag them all from the library section on iPhoto to the photo stream section? And have them upload? I understand videos will sync too but not on iPhoto until 2015.

ps; is iCloud photo library even available yet? theres supposed to be an option under photos on iOS settings; "Optimize iPhone Storage" which i don't see.
 
Yikes. I guess there won't be any true streamlined method until 2015, which is unfortunate cause I am dying to finally get my whole iPhoto library in the cloud.
 
Apple should postpone this feature for iOS till they will release "Photos" for MAC. Because if they will enable now, hard time for Apple support center workers and forum will be overloaded with questions considering iPhoto library moving to iCloud library... Same thing they should have done with iCloud Drive....
 
hi all sorry to jump in on the thread..
not really clued up on all the in's and outs with apple so trying to work out from reading threads..
When i upgraded to iOS8 id bought extra cloud storage to be able get hold of my photos with clogging my phone up.
if i go in settings in my cloud settings looking into my storage then i can see them there but not able to view anything but the photos details size.

So by all accounts then my photos if put in this cloud ill not be able to see until next year on my iPhone???
 
9to5mac recently reported that an iCloud Photos option is being worked on for iCloud.com so my guess is that it will be rolled out alongside Yosemite launch next week. I bet this will have an import option and should work until the Photos.app comes out.
 
9to5mac recently reported that an iCloud Photos option is being worked on for iCloud.com so my guess is that it will be rolled out alongside Yosemite launch next week. I bet this will have an import option and should work until the Photos.app comes out.

Looks like there is the Photos app at beta.icloud.com. That seems to be where we can upload an iPhoto Library for now until the Photos app is released for Yosemite.
 
Looks like there is the Photos app at beta.icloud.com. That seems to be where we can upload an iPhoto Library for now until the Photos app is released for Yosemite.

Surely there HAS to be a more elegant way? Maybe through the iCloud Drive folder on the Mac?
 
I was just contemplating this. I suppose if you upload via iTunes to your phone/tablet then let the syncing take over from there. Might be worth a try...

Don't forget that iTunes sync with iPhoto to your iPhone resizes the photos to 2048 pixels on the longest size. This method DOES NOT give you your high rez photos. I for on am not touching this other than for photos taken with my 6+ until it's out of BETA. Just can't trust Apple cloud services.
 
Just a thought:

Copy the originals to an SD card, and then plug it in using the SD to lightning adapter. You could import them into your camera roll, and then they would upload right to iCloud Photo Library with full quality.

I have not tried this yet, but this could work.
 
I've been using dropbox to transfer images into iOS photo library. The photos appear in the photos app on beta.icloud.com almost instantly.

I'm using the device-optimized storage since I made the egregious and regrettable mistake of trying to save money in the Apple ecosystem by going with 16 gigs, and I'm wondering how it actually manages the storage. I started from camera roll zero and my photo stream disabled so the only photos on the device were 30 or 40 that were taken recently. I imported a bunch of photos from Dropbox (using the 'save original' feature from the Unbound app) and noticed that after a while my local storage for photos was up to 600-700 megs excluding shared photo streams, but according to the icloud control panel my photo library was only taking 300 megs. When I tried using Image Capture to see what showed up under DCIM it was a huge mess of duplicates with full size files and smaller sized files. I tried doing a full erase and restore from iCloud backup and that restored all the photos with my local storage size closer to the iCloud reported size. I'm worried that Apple's way of optimizing device storage for photos is to use all the space available, but with no way to manually free up space to add more apps and music or record a long video. I'm curious to see how much space it will need once I get all 22k of my photos in.
 
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