

Photos – you do it wrong Apple. In 2015 - krzyzanowskim
http://blog.krzyzanowskim.com/2015/05/19/photos-you-do-it-wrong-apple-in-2015/

======
jug
There were two reasons to why I don't use iCloud Drive for photo backups:

\- iCloud Drive doesn't support selective sync. 50 GB photos? 50 GB consumed
everywhere.

\- Apple is for some reasons so weird when it comes to workflows in general. I
don't know, some love iTunes for music management but I never really got along
with them. The problem is that you're always S.O.L. if you don't think as
different as them.

Nowadays I use Dropbox, who conveniently enough revised their account pricing
due to added competition, as my photo archive. And I can store whatever damn
photo formats I wish. Fujifilm RAW's (.RAF) included. :p As well as (perhaps
at least as important) -- formats from future camera purchases I haven't
thought of yet.

~~~
Angostura
> iCloud Drive doesn't support selective sync. 50 GB photos? 50 GB consumed
> everywhere.

To be fair, if you tick 'optimise' on the device, you won't get the full 50GB

------
ulfw
Very much agreed. I am also a paying member of their 200GB plan so I can store
my 25GB of Photos. They magically consume 25GB on my SSD but blow up to 60GB
in the new Photos app. Why - I don't know. Sync between my iPhone, iPad and
Mac basically doesn't work. Several new pictures show up as double or triple
files, which I then have to manually delete. Also deletion does not sync.
Deleting on one device does not delete on other devices (as is intended). A
least for me. Will cancel and go back to Onedrive sync. Sad.

------
maniacalrobot
"I'm a developer so I know what I'm talking about which means that Apple must
be wrong!"

The technical changes of bringing a service like iCloud photos must be massive
when compared to projects that most of us here work on. Millions (billions?)
of users, petabytes(?) of images, support for Desktop and Mobile and Web, and
launched worldwide? Seems to me like they've done a pretty great job handling
this!

I'm a long time user of Aperture and have built up ~200GB of RAW Photos, and
there's no way I trust icloud photos to handle this without corrupting things
with no backup in place that I can control (Sync != Backup). So for now, I've
only setup iCloud photos to work with my iPhone photos (~6Gb, which so far,
has worked excellently. I haven't had any sync issues, in fact sync has been
pretty quick for uploads/edits/deletions/meta.

Of cause, this doesn't mean that issues will become apparent with larger
100GB+ libraries.

Personally, Photos is missing power features that aperture had and i used
extensively, but the promise of a synced photos library across all my devices,
previews and metadata, as a system level service for 3rd party integration is
the icing on the cake.

------
artursapek
I've resorted to sharing photos with family by uploading them to a 200GB EBS
volume and automatically generating simple HTML pages that look like this:

    
    
        <html>
          <head>
          <title>My album name</title>
          </head>
          <body>
            <h1>My album name</h1>
            <img src="/photos/2015/04/IMG_3895.JPG" />
            <p>A caption!</p>
            <img src="/photos/2015/04/IMG_3899.JPG" />
            <video src="/videos/2015/04/IMG_3904.MOV" controls />
            ...
          </body>
        </html>
       
    

It literally took me a week's worth of evenings to scrap it together, and
everyone in my extended family seems to like it. It's fast, simple, and I'm
much closer to "owning" all my photos (the only intermediary is AWS).

I feel fortunate that I know how to do that, seeing what's available to the
"average consumer." It's kind of sad. I have yet to find a photo sharing
product that is not expensive, bloated, and buggy.

~~~
krzyzanowskim
Building html page by hand require some knowledge that is not available to
regular users (as you pointed out). I found Google Drive/Dropbox/... sharing
with link pretty decent, very easy to use and easy enough to manage.

------
antjanus
Sounds like the service should have been backup-only, not a pseudo Dropbox-
like service. The problem here is the expectation and the reality.

For example, I use Backblaze for backup, and backup-only. With that service, I
almost expect it to "take its time" while it loads my files in the web
interface. It's backup!

But with Dropbox, I want to see my file listing instantly and go through a
carousel instantly. But dropbox is not a "photo-only" service and so I give it
leeway as well. And the fact that I can specifically choose what folders to
sync and what folders not is perfect for my resource-strapped laptop.

However, with this service, the expectation comes with computer-like
responsiveness and speed. If I had 200gb of photos on my computer, I'd expect
it accessible instantly. And sharing to work similarly to either network
sharing (mark folders as shared and specify access restrictions) or dropbox
(users co-own folders with a main owner). It seems strange that you can't
share a read-only access to your friends/family. Or to share read/write
access.

I think that if this service was a startup, people wouldn't give it so much
shit about the issues. It's startup, these things will get ironed out. But
when Apple comes out, they boast about their services so much that you expect
them perfect on the first try. This is not a "beta" or "alpha", it's a full
product from a huge company. And it's fundamentally broken.

Especially if you can use the web interface to upload "jpeg-only". Wtf is that
about?

------
kaolinite
Honestly, most of these complaints just seem like bugs. I've heard a number of
people complaining about speed / CPU usage problems. Genuine problem, but
presumably not a design flaw. Frankly, iCloud Photos is so much better than
the previous photo solutions on iOS that slight troubles at the start can be
overlooked. Now let's just hope Apple fixes these problems soon. If they
don't, _that_ will be the real problem.

~~~
Fastidious
It is not a bug that you have 200 GB on iCloud, upload all your 30,000+ photos
and videos to it, and "optimized" it takes 60-70 GB on your desktop computer,
plus your 16 GB iPhone, and 32 GB iPad are completely full.

It might be a bug that while importing your photos to the iCloud library, many
fail to import for no apparent reason, and that when you try re-importing
again end up with thousands of duplicates.

It might be a bug that all, web, desktop Photos.app, and mobile Photos.app get
almost--to fully--unusable with a 120 GB library size.

It is not a bug that there is no selective synchronization, and/or one way
synchronization, so I can synchronize photos from my mobile devices to iCloud
without pulling down existing photos on iCloud to my mobile device.

I agree Photos.app in all devices, and the iCloud is not really viable unless
you are a light user. This guy [1] has similar complains.

[1] [https://collantes.us/bits/icloud-mess/](https://collantes.us/bits/icloud-
mess/)

~~~
kaolinite
It was my understanding that the optimised library changes in size based on
your hard drive. So if you have only 10GB of space left, say, your photo
library will be reduced drastically. They need to work on this because most
people aren't going to want their computer downloading 80GB of photos, but
yes, I'd call that a bug.

Failing imports / duplicates is another issue I've heard about. I haven't
personally experienced it and don't know how prevalent it is, but I hope they
fix it soon. I don't know about library size - I've heard of people with
massive libraries using Photos.app without trouble, but perhaps they had a Mac
Pro or something.

As for selective synchronisation, I'd say that it won't be needed if they fix
the issues (mentioned above) with library size optimisation. The point is: the
user shouldn't have to worry about filling up their devices with photos. As
soon as they're running low on space, Photos will reduce the library size.
Now, that might not be working perfectly at the moment (not sure, works ok for
me), but again - I'd call that a bug.

As I said earlier, the main problem here is whether Apple keeps working on
this and gets updates out quickly. The worst problem of all would be if we
don't see another Photos update until the next version of the OS (well ok,
that's only a month or two away, but nevertheless). If Apple iterates quickly
and keeps on improving the service, personally I'll be happy.

------
bni
Coming from iPhoto I have manually organized my photos into albums.

With the new Photos app this is now broken. There is no way that I can tell if
a photo has been added to an album or not. Some might be added to several
albums (I do not want that), I simply can't find that out.

~~~
bni
Also if I add the same photo to Photos again by mistake, it now sometimes
import a duplicate. iPhoto never did that.

------
btczeus
What you need is ownCloud

