Photos Library Uploading to iCloud Again?

[MattEcho]

So it took me several months to upload all of my 19k photos to iCloud, because I had to constantly turn it off due to no bandwidth and such. Anyway, it finally finishes, I log out of my account on my Macbook Pro. Wife logs into her account on same computer, does her stuff, whatever. A few hours later, I log in and open Photos and what do I see? The entire upload is starting all over again.

At first, it ran through the 19k photos pretty fast. Took like 5 minutes and the status bar filled up. When that finished, it read "Uploading xx,xxx items", counting down from 19k again. It's been running for over an hour now and it looks legit. Activity Monitor shows huge upload activity and the long slow countdown is happening. WTF? Is this a joke? iCloud shows all my photos there. What is there to upload?

At this point, I'm ready to just get rid of iCloud and just run time machine backups.

 

[r0k]

So it took me several months to upload all of my 19k photos to iCloud, because I had to constantly turn it off due to no bandwidth and such. Anyway, it finally finishes, I log out of my account on my Macbook Pro. Wife logs into her account on same computer, does her stuff, whatever. A few hours later, I log in and open Photos and what do I see? The entire upload is starting all over again.

At first, it ran through the 19k photos pretty fast. Took like 5 minutes and the status bar filled up. When that finished, it read "Uploading xx,xxx items", counting down from 19k again. It's been running for over an hour now and it looks legit. Activity Monitor shows huge upload activity and the long slow countdown is happening. WTF? Is this a joke? iCloud shows all my photos there. What is there to upload?

At this point, I'm ready to just get rid of iCloud and just run time machine backups.

I am never impressed with the way Apple handles upload progress, whether it's Time Machine or iCloud or anything else for that matter. The process is far too opaque. If iCloud shows photos already there, then I'd say the backup you are seeing is incremental. I would wait and see what it does. Often, when I get sick of looking at these things, I simply shut it down and let it start up again another time. I've found that more often than not, these "forever" progress reports are a false alarm and it doesn't take that long after all.

The time I've seen the worst case is when doing backups to Time Capsule over a network. In that case the destination "sparsebundle" file got corrupted and I had to start the entire backup over again. I've given up on Time Machine for that reason. I will use it when migrating to a new Mac but I don't bother letting it run all day every day.

For me, iCloud photos, however has been pretty bulletproof. I should mention I do NOT let it send stuff from my Mac to iCloud. My camera is my iPhone 6, not the other way around so I have no reason to ever allow it to send photos from my Mac to iCloud. One reason is there are 500+ meg of them and I'm not about to shell out storage payments for such a large amount of data.

 

[ThE.MeSsEnGeR]

I'm having a similar problem. I waited over a month to upload my 60Gb photo/video library from my MacBook. For a couple of weeks now, it's been a seamless experience. My brother messed around a bit and turned off "iCloud Photo Library" on the Photos app on the Mac. Now, since it was all synced and updated on all my devices, nothing bad really happened. Now I want to reactivate it on the Mac, and the whole upload process starts again. It shouldn't since all my pictures and videos are already on iCloud. Photos app should recognize that. I just read @r0k 's reply advising to let it roll for a while in case it's a false alarm, I hope it is. We'll see tomorrow morning.

 

[zorinlynx]

This is called a reset sync, and it's annoying. It will take pretty much overnight to get through 20K photos. And it won't re-upload ALL your photos again; in my experience with my 120GB library it only uploaded about 9GB. Maybe some items can't be checksummed properly.

 

[ThE.MeSsEnGeR]

nah, it was too much of a hassle... I turned off iCloud Photo Library and downgraded my iCloud storage from 200Gb to 5Gb... I was willing to pay the monthly fee just for the sake of iCloud Photo Library, but I guess it's not ready just yet.