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jcmc

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 16, 2008
152
69
Hi,

I'm having quite an exasperating time with the above and would appreciate any thoughts from similarly afflicted people. I'll try and explain the situation as concisely as possible.

So I have a large Photos library on my Mac (let's call it A). 18 months ago I tried to save them all to the Cloud but gave up after a few weeks with the uploading constantly timing out and Apple staff unable to help. I still wanted the service though so a few weeks back I thought I would try another approach. I started a new library (let's call it B), exported a small subset of pics and videos from A into it, turned on iCloud Photo library and off it went successfully.

So I went back and forth taking small chunks of A, importing them into B and seeing them upload. I managed to upload about 35-40% of my library this way, around 28,000 pics and videos from 70,000 odds.

So this is where things started to go awry. Of course when you export videos from Photos and import them into another library you lose the date they were set to. Faced with having to go in and manually re-change the dates of 3,000 or so videos to where they should be on the timeline was way too daunting for me so I stopped updating the library and turned it off.

Thinking that at least the upload process worked well now, I then turned on A hoping to start the process from scratch. Chaos ensured. Although i had deleted off the partially uploaded B, all those duplicate pictures started downloading to my Mac A library. I manually deleted all of them. Whenever I turned on iCloud Photos on my iOS devices, immediately the partially uploaded (though now deleted and no longer physically existing) B library started populating with pics.

So i let them all come in again, selected them all, deleted them manually from photos and then from the recently deleted folder. Turned off iCloud Photos on iOS devices again, back on and some progress in as much as that previous library does not re-appear.

Ok, so I now try and turn on iCloud Photos again for library A on my Mac and it tells me it wants to try and upload 49,000 or so pictures rather than the 73,000 pictures that constitutes the whole library. This is hypothetical anyway as there is no movement on uploads at all. I try another small test library and nothing uploads.

My theory is that it's something to do with the deleted library sitting in iCloud server memory for 28 days until it deletes, even if you want it to. There seems to be some sort of conflict between old and new and I'll be irritated if I have to wait a month to restart this process. Unless I am way off the mark?

Thanks,

C.
 
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