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.
I might describe myself as an Apple fan boy, but I wholeheartedly agree with this. As one of the few technical people in my family, I get asked about problems with Photo Stream, iCloud, iTunes storage, etc. far more than anything else these days.
It also seems that increasingly, I don't have good answers to those questions because so much of the complexity is hidden (not even accessible by power users or documented online). After months of frustration, I've pretty much decided not to use any of the cloud services on Apple products. I really want to like Apple's cloud services, but I'm not sure any sane person can put up with them on a regular basis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> IE6 was never the most energy efficient browser on desktop or mobile devices
"Browsing on mobile devices" didn't functionally exist when IE6 was released (2001). It would be years before 'mobile browsing' would be a usable thing. I loathe IE6 as much as the next non-frontend-dev, but you're asking IE6 to be something that it was impossible to be.
> you're asking IE6 to be something that it was impossible to be
I'm not the one claiming Safari is "the new IE 6". The person I replied to (and many others) make that comparison, I'm just re-focussing the argument.
> "Browsing on mobile devices" didn't functionally exist when IE6 was released (2001).
For the masses? No. For corporate types? Maybe you should look into Windows CE and Pocket Internet Explorer.
The argument that Safari is "the new IE6" is because Apple focus on user-facing features as a priority over developer focused features. They prioritise energy efficiency (and thus battery life) over absolute raw performance.
Microsoft never had that approach with IE6 - the issue with IE6 wasn't that the focus of development was in the "wrong" place by developer opinions, it's that there was no development focus - it stagnated and received no updates.
> Microsoft never had that approach with IE6 - the issue with IE6 wasn't that the focus of development was in the "wrong" place by developer opinions, it's that there was no development focus - it stagnated and received no updates.
Apart from being more power efficient, there doesn't seem to be much user or developer focused development in Safari. It seems to be stagnating
Content Blocking. Secure password/forms/credit card filling with sync between devices. Reading List, also synced between devices. Bookmarks, also synced between devices. Reader View with optimised "light" and "dark" themes. Tab muting. Airplay Video to network devices.
And to imply that power efficiency isn't a huge user feature is ridiculous. People routinely report getting several hours less battery life using Chrome vs Safari.
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.
"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.
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.
I used to work for Apple as a Software Engineer (in fact as a part of a team very relevant to this issue) and left very quickly. It was the most uninspiring place I had ever worked or even interviewed at.
It's actually been a long time since Maps was a disaster. They fixed the problems, and (in my opinion) it's now better than Google Maps.
Safari's case as a "new IE6" has been overstated, I think. It's fast and standards-compliant, and it's not lagging that far behind in catching up to the newest tech, as far as I know. And it's not like the other browsers don't have their share of serious issues.
Mail and Calendar are actually great for apps that come bundled with the OS. One shouldn't see it as a failure on Apple's part that people choose third-party alternatives. I'd also argue that they're better than most third-party apps. (I use Fantastical instead of Calendar, but only because it has the awesome system menu dropdown. I use Mail, because Sparrow is no longer available, Airmail is too buggy, and Thunderbird isn't native.)
Photos is a great iPhoto replacement. It's a bad Aperture replacement, and some people have issues with iCloud, but if you don't need Aperture and don't have these iCloud issues (and doubt most people do), then it's fine.
iTunes is the main problem. It's tragically, hilariously bad. It was a decent, not great, app back in the early 2000s, back when iPods were the norm. Now, it's a trainwreck.
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.
I stored my photos in year/month directories for years after abandoning iPhoto waaaay back when. Finally settled on Aperture a few years ago.. so I returned to the Finder.
But I swear, with el Capitan, folders with more than about 500 photos will now beachball for minutes at a time waiting for a click. WTF. this ship is sinking.
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...
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...
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 use a Mac Mini, rMBP, retina iPad Mini, and iPhone 6S.
I've never had any trouble with iCloud syncing personally, though I haven't used it for a ton of stuff. Photos is definitely the biggest use I've ever had for iCloud and it works flawlessly from day one for me.
I have 2 OS X machines (a Macbook & iMac), an iPad, and 2 iPhones. My photos, keychains, bookmarks, iCloud drive, etc. do sync reliably & predictably, though the iOS devices need to be on WiFi to sync their photos.
The only area I've had some problems lately with are Contacts. I'll update a contact in one space and not see it updated on another device consistently. Not sure why.
I have 5 devices, 3 synced to the same account, and 2 on separate accounts, using Family Sharing, and photos has worked really well so far. Everything is synced and working well.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
I haven't looked at the source article, but it's worth noting that delete is a decidedly non-trivial operation in a distributed system, especially those designed to not lose data when servers fail.
Objects resurrecting themselves are a reasonable tradeoff for some use cases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.