
I'm done with iCloud Photo Library - alexbilbie
http://www.512pixels.net/blog/2015/11/im-done-with-icloud-photo-library
======
steven2012
Apple's entire iCloud offering is a mess.

I have no idea what the "rules" are. For example, I bought iCloud storage plan
for 200 GB for $4/month, and I'm not sure what that is backing up. Is it just
backing up a single version of my phone? Or multiple, in case I accidentally
delete something? I'm thinking it's the former, which is only barely useful.

I also do a lot of Photostreaming with my family. Photostream is a great
product. I already have 4 separate photostreams with thousands of pictures and
videos, but I'm apparently paying nothing for it. Why? What's the limit? How
can I get a copy of an entire photostream? Can they arbitrarily delete all my
photostreams? All of these I'm unsure about.

The same goes for Photo Library and iCloud Drive. I have no idea how it works,
what the limits are, but I'm too afraid to try it because of the things that
OP says. It may delete my entire photo library, and I can't afford that
because I have years upon years of photos on my iPhone of my family that I
can't lose.

I wish the explanations were better, and their guarantees were stronger. As I
said, it feels like their entire offering is a mess, which is too bad, because
it shouldn't be this confusing and bad for all of their success.

~~~
zwily
The first hit to "photo stream limits":

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT202299)

I don't know if that answers your questions or not. It does seem kind of
complicated.

~~~
steven2012
Exactly. I already found this page, and I still don't understand. I can upload
25,000 photos to my photostream per month? For free? That doesn't sound right.
Do they get deleted? I purposefully create a new photostream when I get close
to 1000 photos/videos, just because I remember reading somewhere that 1000 was
the limit per photostream, but I don't see it listed here.

As I said, the entire thing is way too complicated.

~~~
stephenr
Photo stream is meant to let you sync photos between devices - that's why
photos get removed automatically.

What you want is regular shared albums.

The upload limits are to do with the number of images you can upload per
hour/day/month - they're about the amount of uploaded items not stored items.

~~~
steven2012
There is nothing that I've read that describes what you said.

That said, I have multiple photostreams with almost 1000 photos/videos per
photostream, and none have been deleted. So I'm not sure how it's supposed to
work, if it is just a sync mechanism. As well, I do know that without an
internet connection, the videos don't work, so I'm not sure what "sync" even
means in this context.

~~~
stephenr
> There is nothing that I've read that describes what you said.

Literally the second (non-ad) result when I searched on DDG for "apple
photostream": [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT201317](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201317)

From that page:

The subheading says: "With My Photo Stream, you can access the recent photos
that you take with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, on your Mac and PC."

Under the instructions about setting it up is this:

> My Photo Stream uploads your most recent photos so you can view and import
> them to all of your devices. Photos are stored in My Photo Stream for 30
> days.

I don't know what material you've been reading, but Photostream has _always_
been marketed by Apple as a way to get photos from any of your devices, onto
the others. Think of it like a delayed queue. Device A uploads the 5 photos
you just took to the photostream. Devices B and C connect later (either
because they were off, or had no Wifi, etc) and (depending on your settings)
can download those 5 photos. After a month, the photos are automatically
deleted from the photo stream.

In the world of iCloud Photo Library, the only reason to keep the "Upload to
My Photo Stream" option turned on, is if you have a device that can't use the
new Photos app (e.g. older iOS/OSX).

Based on what you're saying about "multiple PhotoStreams" I don't even know
what you're doing. Are you __sure __what you 're using is PhotoStreams, and
not just regular shared albums? It doesn't sound anything like PhotoStream if
you have multiple, long-lived collections.

~~~
steven2012
This is funny. You're right. What I thought were Photostreams are actually
iCloud Shared Albums. No wonder I've been so confused. However, they used to
be called Photo Streams, I believe. Or at least, they used to be called
"streams", which is probably why I conflated the terms. I know they were
called streams because I just checked my iPhone 4, which is still on IOS
7.1.2, and it says distinctly "Create New Stream". On IOS 8, it says "Start
Sharing". I just never noticed they got rid of the term stream and/or changed
the meaning. I can honestly say at this point I don't know what a Photostream
is anymore then.

~~~
stephenr
As I said, your Photostream is just the last 30 days of photos from any device
said to upload to it. This allows automatic import into other devices, if you
aren't using iCloud Photo Library (or if some devices can't use it)

I've definitely had some issues with their iCloud related Photo systems, but
the little messing around I've had to do has been worth it for the
functionality when they work, IMO.

------
hguant
Haven't we established pretty firmly that apple software (for OSX and
increasingly iOS) is crap? iTunes is a bloated mess, Safari is the new IE6,
photos, calendar and Mail are so bad that pretty much everyone recommends
Google or Microsoft replacements, Maps is a disaster. They make a great
physical product, but more and more, the "it just works" tag line only applies
to basic, trivial operations (and evidently, not even then) or as a punchline.

~~~
steven2012
Apple is really treating their entire iPhone ecosystem like Microsoft did with
their Windows OS back in the late 90s/early 2000s.. with complete arrogance
and without any urgency. They are so comfortable in their success that they're
are really badly losing focus on making the best software products they can.

It makes me wonder, who in Apple is fucking this up so badly? Does no one
care, or do they honestly think things are going great? I have to change my
computer that I need to sync my iPhone with, and it's going to be very
painful. Why? This is 2015. Why doesn't anyone in Apple with their thousands
and thousands of highly paid engineers not care, and which VP or PM is
responsible for their software offering now being the best it could be? I
would love to know.

~~~
parasubvert
"I have to change my computer that I need to sync my iPhone with, and it's
going to be very painful. Why? "

I have the opposite question for you - why is it painful?

Assuming you have a Mac, you just restore from a Time machine backup with
Migration Assistant. A bit of massaging is required getting passwords reset,
etc., and your new computer is basically identical to the old one. I just did
this a couple of months ago moving my personal Macbook Pro account & apps to
my family iMac.

On the other hand, the same applies for any iOS device if you're on iCloud. A
few months back, a friend broke their phone badly on a trip, I wiped one of my
phones and handed it to them to use. They restored their stuff in a couple of
hours, and were productive again. When they returned it, I restored and had my
old phone back identical to what it was in a couple of hours. Other than a
couple of passwords and the endless series annoying taps when first
initializing an iOS phone (this could be much better), there were no problems.

YMMV, but this stuff mostly works for me.

~~~
steven2012
I'm currently syncing on a very old MacBook and I want to move to my work
MacBook. I can't Timemachine it.

~~~
parasubvert
For what it's worth, you can direct-connect the Migration Assistant as well
via FireWire USB or (I think?) Ethernet.... I remember doing this back to the
PowerBook days.

------
clord
Just started abandoning Photos today too. I have a 1.5TB library, so it never
did fit on iCloud Photos. Switched back to plain old file system directories
with all the files named uniquely, and it's surprisingly refreshing. No beach-
balls, no BS prompts about not having enough space on iCloud even though I
don't use it. Better integrated with the tools I use too (DxO).

Apple's whole 'Each app is it's own file manager' theme is getting really
tired.

~~~
gopher2
Where do you store your library?

~~~
veidr
I'm not clord, but I have a similar setup. I store my 1TB+ library on a 10TB
thunderbolt RAID box directly attached to my main workstation (a Mac Pro).

It's backed up to the cloud with Arq (which is great) and also Backblaze
(which I am less sure about, never had to use it).

This is more flexible and monoculture-avoiding than any of the cloud services;
using the stock OS file sharing, the Mac Mini that runs my TV mounts a subset
of the library (the "2015" folder) read-only, and uses that to run the
screensaver so that when the TV is idle (hopefully most of the time) we see a
nice recent photos montage.

It's also great when you somehow _really need those photos from last July_ for
some reason; just SFTP in from any kind of computer and download the "2014-07"
folder.

I would like to have a web UI for it, but not a shitty one, which is all I
have been able to find. Building one sounds fun, but nope, I have kids, maybe
when I am in my sixties... it's not really a thing that I actually need. But I
do like having it.

I keep 500GB or so in Google Photos, and also in iCloud photo library to try
those out.

Google Photos is pretty good for a web app, and very fast for a web app, which
means it is way to slow and way to shitty for me to use as a main tool of
managing my photos.

Photos.app is OK when it works, but it's Apple, so as many people here and the
guy whose blog post spawned this whole thread have noted, it has far too many
bugs and weird failure modes (many of which would be catastrophic without good
backups). Even though I have good backups of the photo files themselves, I am
not going to invest time in arranging things in Photos albums when the
preponderance of historical experience indicates there is _zero chance_ those
albums will be readable/usable in ten (EDIT: okay, maybe 20) years without
resorting to e.g. maintaining a VM of ancient OS X...

------
dankohn1
I sync 195 GB of photos and videos between 5(!!!) Macs and 2 iPhones. I have
had trouble with iCloud in the past, but iCloud Photos has worked flawlessly
for me.

Because I'm paranoid, I do back up everything to Backblaze, which I also
recommend.

I particularly recommend this technique I worked out for my wife and I to
share the same iCloud photos (but not email, contacts, etc.) so that we both
see pictures of the kids that we take:
[http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/27648/photo-
streams...](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/27648/photo-streams-from-
two-or-more-icloud-accounts-into-same-iphoto-library/185991#185991)

------
eridius
I love iCloud Photo Library. It's worked completely flawlessly for me, across
2 OS X machines and one iPhone. And Photos.app is so much better than iPhoto
was.

~~~
ioquatix
I have a similar feeling, it's all working pretty well. I couldn't help
reading your comment and lamenting a bit for Aperture though.

------
rebootthesystem
Apple's entire iCloud setup and iPhone synchronization has been a hot mess
since day one. Early on my wife lost all of her valuable address book contacts
and all of her calendar entries for the mere act of taking one of our iPads
off the iCloud service. None of the entries had been made on the iPad, in
fact, all of them were made on her iPhone, which was never removed from
iCloud. Apple's shitty software somehow decided the iPad "owned" the data and,
once disconnected, it yanked all of it from iCloud, her iPhone and ever device
she had synced. Pure crap.

The same is true of this business where Apple will erase your phone if you
dare connect to an iTunes installation that's not "blessed" even if all you
want to use it for is to backup.

What has always bothered me intensely about Apple is how arrogant they are
with MY data and MY access to MY data. Who owns it?

------
rajibsingh
Have you tried Google Photos? It's working extremely well for me and I'm
paying some nominal $9.99 to get 1tb of storage and which is more than
adequate for my usage as it also replaces Dropbox (using Google Drive) and the
tools for automatically backing up from my phone as well as my desktop work
quite well.

~~~
giovannibajo1
I tried for a couple months two years ago when they launched it (the newest
iteration with unlimited "small" photos etc.). I had some troubles keeping the
sync going from the phone but that I know was mostly Apples fault not
providing a decent background API for this task (it is now available so I
assume google photos has begun using it). The showstopper for me has been the
web application which was unable to power a medium size library with decent
navigation / organization tools. One thing that Apple nails is that the
"moments" feature is a very good replacement albums for lazy people, as pics
are grouped by time/location automatically. Google showed me a single stream
and a search bar, which is too little to go getting that picture set from the
summer last year.

Also, the main view in Google photos had infinite scrolling which is an ok
technology for streams (Facebook etc.) but very bad for people needing to jump
back to specific points. Apple Photos navigation of moments with its three or
four different zoom levels is far superior.

That said, I'm sure Google Photos has evolved in two years... I'd like to
check back

------
tammer
I think you see a widely disproportionate amount of these reports with Apple's
services from the tech/blogger/twitter crowd (same went along with Apple
Music). I believe this is because Apple mainly tests in clean environments,
and doesn't account for permission and process changes incurred by user
intervention or application installs.

Advanced users like things to be just-so, and whatever that is often reveals
flaws in these services. By taking a polling of the vocal tech community you'd
think these services were a horrid mess. I, however, along with millions of
others, use these services glitch-free with only temporary service outages.

Is this a good practice? Naturally that depends on who you are. I'm sure it
works best for their bottom line.

~~~
matdrewin
I've been playing around with different account arrangements for family
sharing and it seems to work quite well so far, not too many glitches. I was
expecting problems since I probably wasn't doing what the average user would
do.

------
sqldba
I'm not surprised. Apple appears to have shit the bed with most of its cloud
offerings whether it's Photos or Music.

It's amazing that with their attention to detail on hardware that they just
can't get the software right - or even safe. I wonder what their problem is.

------
dcw303
I know these kind of discussions generally polarise people, and we end up with
a bunch of subjective reports of how it does / does not work, but I'd really
be interested to know if _anyone_ has a use case where 1 or more os x machines
and 1 or more ios devices have every synced in icloud reliably.

For the (subjective) record, I have never had icloud sync work as expected -
it always finds a way to eat files.

~~~
eridius
I use 2 OS X machines and an iPhone (I have an iPad too but I almost never use
it). And I've never had iCloud eat anything. The worst behavior I've ever seen
is upon rare occasion having iCloud take longer than expected to sync changes
made to stuff in iCloud Drive, but that's it.

During the OS X betas, I've had some issues with the underlying daemons that
manages iCloud sync (e.g. bird), but that was a developer beta so it doesn't
really count, and it still never actually lost data.

------
i_cant_speel
I had similar issues trying to backup contacts from an iPhone to the iCloud. I
turned iCloud on and it prompted me to choose if I wanted to merge my iCloud
contacts list and my phone list or if I wanted to delete my phone list and
just import the iCloud list. I chose to merge the two. When it was done
syncing, I had gone from ~400 contacts to 12 contacts for no apparent reason.

I was going to undo it by restoring from a previous backup. So I go into
iTunes and decide to backup the phone beforehand in case anything goes wrong.
It was only then that I realized that the new backup deletes the older backup
and I was SOL.

iCloud is an unintuitive and buggy mess.

------
sosuke
I've stopped using iCloud Photos for my wife and me after we discovered the
undeleted photos issue. Undeleted photos and undeleted photos in messages
coming back from the iCloud were very frightening. If I can't delete from a
cloud service I can't trust it. Delete was redefined. I was in denial for a
bit actually thinking that no programmer would do that.

~~~
eridius
Can you elaborate? I've never heard of this issue before. Especially when you
mention "photos in messages", because Messages.app and iCloud Photo Library
are completely unrelated (photos in iMessages are stored in the Messages
database and aren't even in your local photo library unless you manually save
the photo).

~~~
sosuke
I spent a while with higher level Apple support talking to developers over a
weeks time. What happened was photos in message threads that had been deleted,
and photos that had been deleted, reappeared during the iOS8 update.
Supposedly it was a bug in iOS6 that was fixed by iOS7 so that was the
explanation of why these zombie photos appeared again when iOS8 had the view
message history photos feature.

That is the best I can remember at least it was a good while back now.

~~~
eridius
Curious bug. I'm still confused as to what this has to do with iCloud Photo
Library though (or even with the Photos app). The bug as described isn't
related to iCloud at all, since your iMessages are stored in a local database
and aren't persisted on Apple's servers (it sounds like the bug was the
message thread was deleted from the local database, but not the message
attachments, so the new View Photos feature was able to find those orphaned
photos).

------
mark_l_watson
I tried it for a week, but stuck with "my system:"

I have my Note 4 'phone' setup to wait until I am on a wifi connection and
then backup photos and videos to OneDrive, Google Photos, and Dropbox. I
delete old photos from Dropbox occasionally to keep under my storage limit. I
tend to delete unwanted pictures before I get back on wifi.

All photo file names start with a date and time stamp so everything is
organized chronologically. On OneDrive I sometimes add a text description to
favorite photos after the time stamp: when I am zipping through a date range
occasional descriptions help navigate.

I let Google Photos organize my photos also.

One problem is that I run Timemachine backups on my primary laptop and so I
end up getting three copies of everything on my local backups.

Edit: I use selective sync on OneDrive and Dropbox to only keep a month or two
of pictures on my laptop. I access old photos from the web interface.

------
LeoPanthera
iCloud Music Library is similarly unreliable. It hasn't (so far) corrupted my
library, but attempting to download or stream music onto my iPhone _often_
fails. It just hangs up, or stops mid-stream.

Hugely disappointing. Apple just doesn't seem to be able to figure out how to
make reliable cloud services.

------
inthewoods
To me, the real issue is that no other photo app can get close to iCloud
synching. I've tried Dropbox, Google Photos, et al - but none of them can sync
reliably - and it's not their fault as far as I can see.

iCloud, for me, syncs photos well - I then run Google Photos on my MBP to sync
back to Google - but it's a half-assed solution. The best solution would be
allowing photo apps to upload in the background without being brought to the
foreground on the iPhone, but I don't see Apple doing this.

It's really the only thing I miss from having an Android phone.

------
watmough
Wow, terrifying.

This is kinda similar to why I use SuperDuper to image my Mac, instead of
trusting Time Machine.

I do love Apple, but there's a few wrinkles sometimes.

~~~
cloudwalking
I have never successfully restored a computer from Time Machine backup. The
operation _always_ fails.

~~~
veidr
Me too! I have never used it for my own backups, but at least 6-7 times a
family member (for whom I am de facto emergency tech support) has called me
with a borked Mac and a Time Machine backup. In _every single instance_ the
restore operation has failed.

(Most common failure mode is to like appear to be working for hours/overnight,
then say something helpful like "Unable to restore Time Machine backup").

Backup is the very last thing I would trust Apple to do.

------
aplsek
I would recommend giving a try to Upthere, we are still in Beta but I think
you may like some of the features.

Here is a prioritized invitation to our Beta program :
[https://www.upthere.com/signup/?inviter=6503411334330319390](https://www.upthere.com/signup/?inviter=6503411334330319390)

------
swiley
I'm giving synching a try after fighting with Google drive both on my phone
and on my laptop. The complete lack of a Linux client meant I could never
heavily use it anyway. iCloud sounds like it has all the Google drive problems
and then some.

