I want to share my experience, potentially to help others and hopefully to get advice myself.
On my iMac I have a collection of about 25,000 photos and perhaps 100 short videos amounting to 175gb. They are organised into about 250 folders, a few of which have sub-folders. The folders are sorted alpha-numerically with names which reflect the relevant date, eg currently 2020.11. Most photos have originated on digital cameras over the last 20 years and a proportion are older photos which have been scanned; only a few originate on our iOS devices. The photos have not been in the iMac’s Photos app.
My wife and each have iPads and iPhones and an ATV, and we like to view any of the photos readily on these devices. We want to see them in their usual folder structure.
For some years the iMac photos have been shared with the iOS devices by syncing by cable, previously via iTunes, latterly via Finder, and to the ATV via Home Sharing. These approaches have been satisfactory when working properly and offer the advantage of being able to be selective in the sharing if wanted. Often all has been well. But too often it has not. Syncs have many times failed to complete, or process ends with no change in content. Or groups of folders are missing. Of the sequence of folders has been screwed up. Or, lately, photos have appeared in the wrong folders.
I have spent very many hours talking to Apple technical support, who have usually addressed the problems with great diligence but with no lasting effect. In January 2018 I emailed Tim Cook, and receiving a reply from a Shane Barton, Executive Relations EMEIA. Matters were referred to engineers on at least 2 occasions but Shane essentially gave up in October 2018.
I have often considered using the iMac’s Photos app, and perhaps iCloud Photos, but been reluctant to do so. Reasons include wanting to maintain full control of my photos, hearing bad things about both the app and iCloud, concern about the cost of using iCloud for this collection, and the effort involved in trying to get the app to reproduce my album structure. And I recall one of the most helpful Apple advisers saying that my syncing method should be the most reliable.
But on reading that the Photos app has a “keep file structure” importing option, and with reduced iCloud costs, I have started to bite the bullet. But, ignoring my own mis-steps, and despite oversight again from Apple technical support, this is my experience to date.
Initial test import of 6gb of phots into app seemed ok, but took about 18 hours to upload to the Cloud despite a fast (30mbps) upload capacity. (Subsequent uploads seem to have been faster.) And photos, in albums, were received on iPhone and ATV.
On my iMac I have a collection of about 25,000 photos and perhaps 100 short videos amounting to 175gb. They are organised into about 250 folders, a few of which have sub-folders. The folders are sorted alpha-numerically with names which reflect the relevant date, eg currently 2020.11. Most photos have originated on digital cameras over the last 20 years and a proportion are older photos which have been scanned; only a few originate on our iOS devices. The photos have not been in the iMac’s Photos app.
My wife and each have iPads and iPhones and an ATV, and we like to view any of the photos readily on these devices. We want to see them in their usual folder structure.
For some years the iMac photos have been shared with the iOS devices by syncing by cable, previously via iTunes, latterly via Finder, and to the ATV via Home Sharing. These approaches have been satisfactory when working properly and offer the advantage of being able to be selective in the sharing if wanted. Often all has been well. But too often it has not. Syncs have many times failed to complete, or process ends with no change in content. Or groups of folders are missing. Of the sequence of folders has been screwed up. Or, lately, photos have appeared in the wrong folders.
I have spent very many hours talking to Apple technical support, who have usually addressed the problems with great diligence but with no lasting effect. In January 2018 I emailed Tim Cook, and receiving a reply from a Shane Barton, Executive Relations EMEIA. Matters were referred to engineers on at least 2 occasions but Shane essentially gave up in October 2018.
I have often considered using the iMac’s Photos app, and perhaps iCloud Photos, but been reluctant to do so. Reasons include wanting to maintain full control of my photos, hearing bad things about both the app and iCloud, concern about the cost of using iCloud for this collection, and the effort involved in trying to get the app to reproduce my album structure. And I recall one of the most helpful Apple advisers saying that my syncing method should be the most reliable.
But on reading that the Photos app has a “keep file structure” importing option, and with reduced iCloud costs, I have started to bite the bullet. But, ignoring my own mis-steps, and despite oversight again from Apple technical support, this is my experience to date.
Initial test import of 6gb of phots into app seemed ok, but took about 18 hours to upload to the Cloud despite a fast (30mbps) upload capacity. (Subsequent uploads seem to have been faster.) And photos, in albums, were received on iPhone and ATV.
- But while photos staying in their folders, the sequence of folders was not maintained, There is a facility to sort by name which worked given my folder-naming approach but this could be a problem for anyone not using sortable names.
- Under the supervision of tech support, I attempted to load my whole collection into the app. But the import was showing that only c6000 of the c25000 were loading. The adviser looked forward eagerly to seeing the concluding error message but there was none.
- Having deleted these, we attempted to load a subset of about 6000. The loading count showed a shortfall of about 40. Again, no error message.
- Having deleted these, I am now loading a folder at a time, checking that the count is correct. This is tedious, but all is well so far.
- An irritant is that each “folder” loaded has a correspondingly named “album” within it, in turn holding the photos. So I am moving the albums out of their folder, then deleting the folder.