Hello!
So I've been making use of the iCloud Photos sync functionality for about a year now. There have been some pretty significant bumps along the road, but up until a week ago they were somewhat tolerable.
Not so, beginning on April 17th. The cloud library synched flawlessly between my two macs, but failed to sync up or down from my iPhone or iPad. I spent two hours with apple support yesterday, going through the various standard settings options, "do all the devices have the same apple ID" crap. I got sent to a senior advisor, who also couldn't resolve the issue. She wants to elevate the issue to engineering.
Because I have some data privacy concerns about elevating the case to the engineering level (would be great if anybody could shed some light on what access apple engineers would actually have to my photos and data), I've done some more problem solving on my own.
Today I toggled the iCloud Photos Library option on/off for both my iPhone and iPad, because it was a recommended step online. The step appears to have restarted synching (yay!). Unfortunately it has illuminated a massive weakness in the program.
The Apple Photos App fails to cross reference between photos that are already on the device, and in the cloud. Both my iPhone and iPad are trying to sync 16 GB of photos and videos to the cloud, and the system doesn't realize that the overwhelming majority of that content is already in the cloud (the last week of failed synching represents only ~100 photos). Not only does this place a significant burden on my ISP's monthly bandwidth cap, but I run the risk of having a crap ton of duplicated (3?!) for every item. Even if the system recognizes and eliminates the duplicates post upload, it will have wasted 32 GB of bandwidth, and many hours of my time.
Basically, what needs to change is that the app needs to recognize whether a photo is already synched to the iCloud library without it being uploaded first. Maybe they could do this using metadata, file name, creation date - whatever it takes. Using this improved method would probably reduced the data needed for cross referencing to less than 1 GB per device.
Would be interested to hear your thoughts. Have you had problems with the synching?
So I've been making use of the iCloud Photos sync functionality for about a year now. There have been some pretty significant bumps along the road, but up until a week ago they were somewhat tolerable.
Not so, beginning on April 17th. The cloud library synched flawlessly between my two macs, but failed to sync up or down from my iPhone or iPad. I spent two hours with apple support yesterday, going through the various standard settings options, "do all the devices have the same apple ID" crap. I got sent to a senior advisor, who also couldn't resolve the issue. She wants to elevate the issue to engineering.
Because I have some data privacy concerns about elevating the case to the engineering level (would be great if anybody could shed some light on what access apple engineers would actually have to my photos and data), I've done some more problem solving on my own.
Today I toggled the iCloud Photos Library option on/off for both my iPhone and iPad, because it was a recommended step online. The step appears to have restarted synching (yay!). Unfortunately it has illuminated a massive weakness in the program.
The Apple Photos App fails to cross reference between photos that are already on the device, and in the cloud. Both my iPhone and iPad are trying to sync 16 GB of photos and videos to the cloud, and the system doesn't realize that the overwhelming majority of that content is already in the cloud (the last week of failed synching represents only ~100 photos). Not only does this place a significant burden on my ISP's monthly bandwidth cap, but I run the risk of having a crap ton of duplicated (3?!) for every item. Even if the system recognizes and eliminates the duplicates post upload, it will have wasted 32 GB of bandwidth, and many hours of my time.
Basically, what needs to change is that the app needs to recognize whether a photo is already synched to the iCloud library without it being uploaded first. Maybe they could do this using metadata, file name, creation date - whatever it takes. Using this improved method would probably reduced the data needed for cross referencing to less than 1 GB per device.
Would be interested to hear your thoughts. Have you had problems with the synching?