I don't understand iCloud Photo Library

[Dino F]

....well, iCloud Photo Library STILL not working for me.

Photos between my iPhone 6 and iPad 2 are indeed perfectly synced (adding or deleting a pic on one device results in the same action on the other device), however, http://www.icloud.com STILL refuses to work at all?

Biggest issues:

1. Photos I delete on the website (no matter HOW many times I delete them) re-appear when I sign out and then sign back in.
2. Photos on the website do NOT sync with my iPhone or iPad.

COME. ON. APPLE. SORT. THIS. MESS. OUT.

 

[s2mikey]

....well, iCloud Photo Library STILL not working for me.

Photos between my iPhone 6 and iPad 2 are indeed perfectly synced (adding or deleting a pic on one device results in the same action on the other device), however, http://www.icloud.com STILL refuses to work at all?

Biggest issues:

1. Photos I delete on the website (no matter HOW many times I delete them) re-appear when I sign out and then sign back in.
2. Photos on the website do NOT sync with my iPhone or iPad.

COME. ON. APPLE. SORT. THIS. MESS. OUT.

Yeah, they go some work to do. In fairness it does say it's a beta version so some usability and weird bugs are to be expected.

So far, Amazon cloud for photos seems to be a great alternative.

 

[bripab007]

Flickr is even better: 1TB of storage for free accounts, no delineation between photo and video files--they both use the same 1TB.

 

[Dino F]

....well, iCloud Photo Library STILL not working for me.

Photos between my iPhone 6 and iPad 2 are indeed perfectly synced (adding or deleting a pic on one device results in the same action on the other device), however, http://www.icloud.com STILL refuses to work at all?

Biggest issues:

1. Photos I delete on the website (no matter HOW many times I delete them) re-appear when I sign out and then sign back in.
2. Photos on the website do NOT sync with my iPhone or iPad.

COME. ON. APPLE. SORT. THIS. MESS. OUT.

....well, over the weekend, I managed to go through all my photos on both my iPhone 6 and iPad 2 and made sure that both devices were showing the same exact photos - which they are indeed now showing so at least I now know that iCloud Photo Library is indeed working properly on these devices (when I( take a photo on one device, it automatically appears on the other device in the 'All Photos' folder. Similarly, when I add photos as 'Favourites', the photo appears in the 'Favourites' folder on both devices).

HOWEVER, the website - http://www.icloud.com, is still, A COMPLETE SHAMBLES. It shows photos, which I have deleted COUNTLESS times and have returned(?) and in my 'Favourites' folder, there is only 1 photo despite the fact that I should have around 10. Its a complete JOKE

iCloud Photo Library works between my iPhone 6 and iPad 2 but the website just seems to show a static image of whatever photos it has chosen (I delete photos but hey just keep coming back).

I have now filed a bug report for this because it is beyond a joke now......

I will now add that I have concluded that iCloud Photo Library DOES NOT WORK AT ALL how it is supposed to work.

I took a photo on my iPhone 6 last night and quite rightly, it shows in the 'All Photos' folder on my iPhone, and it also appears in the same folder on my iPad 2, so it is indeed going up to the cloud (I have the 'Upload to Photostream' feature turned off on both devices) and being distributed to all my iDevices.

HOWEVER - on http://www.icloud.com, this same photo does NOT appear? Also, I just noticed that on my iPhone, I have 15 photos marked as 'Favorites' (by tapping the heart icon), however, icloud.com, it only shows 1 photo in the same 'Favorites' folder?

Jesus Apple - I know the service is in BETA but lets at least get the fundamentals working first.................

Is there a way I can add photos directly on icloud.com to see if it will appear on my iPhone?

....well, it finally looks like Apple is indeed pulling their finger out!!

Just checked on beta.icloud.com and I can now see the same exact pictures which are showing on both my iPad 2 and iPhone 6

The Favorites folder on the website is now also showing the same photos which I have added from both my iDevices too

Plus, the new feature which has been added to the website, is the ability to upload photos directly onto the website, as detailed here :

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1815564/

Finally - we are making some progress!!!

 

[InsideTJ]

I'm pretty sure it's working "as designed" and the description is wrong.

Optimized seems to only be when syncing photos from iCloud Photo Library. If the photos were taken on said device, they aren't optimized (which would entail deleting the local photo and downloading the optimized version).

I believe the same thing happens when you actually view a photo on a device set to optimized. It downloads a full size copy of the photo and stores it.

Overall I'm not really sure what the point of "optimized" mode is, since there's no way to delete the full sized version off the phone without also removing it from iCloud Photo Library, so there's no way to free up space.

This makes sense. Your last sentence is a great question.

Looks like the mac app may be required to fully manage ICPL.

 

[newagemac]

People posting about Amazon's cloud solution clearly don't understand it's not the same thing and doesn't do nearly the same things iCloud Photo Library does.

iCloud Photo Library is not just a backup or storage for your photos in the cloud. It literally is a library manager for your photos in the cloud. So when you edit a photo on one device or the web, that edited photo shows on every device and without duplicating the photo. And you can remove the edits at any time because all the edits are nondestructive.

Plus when you delete a photo on one device or the web, everything stays in sync on every device. Same goes for arranging albums, favoriting photos, and all the different things you can do with your photo library. You no longer have to manage photos on different devices to keep your library consistent because with iCloud Photo Library you have one unified photo library.

With Amazon and similar storage solutions, they are just storage. So you end up with multiple different photo libraries. So it doesn't make sense to compare them to iCloud because they simply aren't doing as much.

 

[Zetaprime]

People posting about Amazon's cloud solution clearly don't understand it's not the same thing and doesn't do nearly the same things iCloud Photo Library does.



iCloud Photo Library is not just a backup or storage for your photos in the cloud. It literally is a library manager for your photos in the cloud. So when you edit a photo on one device or the web, that edited photo shows on every device and without duplicating the photo. And you can remove the edits at any time because all the edits are nondestructive.



Plus when you delete a photo on one device or the web, everything stays in sync on every device. Same goes for arranging albums, favoriting photos, and all the different things you can do with your photo library. You no longer have to manage photos on different devices to keep your library consistent because with iCloud Photo Library you have one unified photo library.



With Amazon and similar storage solutions, they are just storage. So you end up with multiple different photo libraries. So it doesn't make sense to compare them to iCloud because they simply aren't doing as much.

That may all be true, however for many of us a service like Amazon is sufficient and maybe we would rather that the photos on our devices be left alone and not messed with in any way.

 

[newagemac]

That may all be true, however for many of us a service like Amazon is sufficient and maybe we would rather that the photos on our devices be left alone and not messed with in any way.

Well then that's great for you. Many of us have been wanting something like iCloud Photo Library for a long time and we are happy that it's finally here. Well, it won't be fully complete until the new Photos app for Mac is here. But make no mistake, what iCloud Photo Library is offering is not being offering by anyone else nor on any other platform.

Also this whole thread can be answered but just saying iCloud Photo Library is like IMAP for photos. People who don't understand it are like those who didn't understand why IMAP email is better than POP email. It took a long time for some people to get their heads around the idea that you shouldn't have to delete an email on your Mac that you already deleted on the web or your iPhone. IMAP makes your email just one unified library where changes on one device gets reflected on all other devices. And that's exactly how iCloud Photo Library works, but for photos.

Same way CardDAV and CalDAV works for contacts and calendars. In my and many other people's opinion, managing different libraries on different devices is time consuming and pointless since you're the same person no matter what device you're using. If I delete an email because I consider it spam, I don't all of a sudden consider it no longer spam just because I switched to a different device. If I update a contact because their phone number changed, I shouldn't have to make that same change again on all my other devices. It should be one unified library because I am the same person no matter which one of my devices I am using.

Same goes for photos. If I favorite a bunch of vacation photos and delete the bad ones, I don't all of a sudden like different photos because now I'm on my tablet instead of on my phone or vice versa. If I edit a photo on my Mac, I don't want the edits not to show just because I viewed my library from a different device. That doesn't make any sense.

 

[Abazigal]

icloud photo library is still bonkers for me.

I turned it on, and my photos are not uploading. It seems because I tried the feature a few weeks ago (but aborted halfway because the uploading went haywire), and it still thinks that is the most recent update. Now, it keeps downloading videos which I have already deleted (and want to stay deleted) and refuses to upload any of the photos on my camera roll. :roll eyes:

Looks like I have to wait for another 2 weeks for iCloud photo library to fully purge my existing photos still stored inside before I can give it another whirl.

 

[Zetaprime]

icloud photo library is still bonkers for me.

I turned it on, and my photos are not uploading. It seems because I tried the feature a few weeks ago (but aborted halfway because the uploading went haywire), and it still thinks that is the most recent update. Now, it keeps downloading videos which I have already deleted (and want to stay deleted) and refuses to upload any of the photos on my camera roll. :roll eyes:

Looks like I have to wait for another 2 weeks for iCloud photo library to fully purge my existing photos still stored inside before I can give it another whirl.

If I were you I'd wait till it's out of beta and there's a proper Mac app for it before trying it again. And that's if you really ever want to try it again.

 

[Abazigal]

If I were you I'd wait till it's out of beta and there's a proper Mac app for it before trying it again. And that's if you really ever want to try it again.

I suppose you are right. iOS 8 is still very new to me, so I am still playing around with the various features. Some work pretty well (extensions, quick reply, widgets), some not so well (3rd party keyboards, handoff and airdrop between my iOS devices and my Mac), or not at all (iCloud sync is still broken between notability on my iOS devices and my Mac, and the aforementioned photo library).

Just yesterday, my 5s experienced abnormally quick battery drain, then froze and needed a hard reset.

Apple really has a lot of work still cut out for them.

 

[GermanSuplex]

If it works as intended, that would be great. I do wish they had a certain amount of storage separate from iCloud data as they did with Photostream, but I suppose as long as photos on your devices aren't being redundantly backed up when you back up your iOS device to iCloud, it's not a big deal.

I have a lot of videos though, so there's no chance of them making the transition over to the cloud. And I'll probably have to convert all my .tiff files to jpeg, but I'm not a huge photographer or anything, they're just scans I wanted to have in case the pictures were ever gone.

 

[azukre]

Looks like the resolution and size for icloud photo and video are exactly the same!

 

[andyb488]

I think it works and it works just fine as to how I would expect it to work on my IOS devices. What I don't like with it however is the windows pc syncing, pictures no longer 'download' to my pc I have to use the web page to view images on my pc and download them either one at a time or several in one batch its just a little long winded, compared to the likes of dropbox copies of pictures are sync'd to a folder on my machine automatically, icloud doesn't do that, with dropbox this means I can create albums etc on my pc and they sync automatically to back my dropbox.

For me its just missing a few final touched to make it complete.

 

[Morac]

I think it works and it works just fine as to how I would expect it to work on my IOS devices. What I don't like with it however is the windows pc syncing, pictures no longer 'download' to my pc....

Downloading to the PC still uses "My Photo Stream". If you turned that off in your iOS devices, turn it back on and downloading should work fine.

 

[Morac]

Is there any way to free up space used by photos when iCloud Photos is turned on? Deleting the photos with iCloud Photos enabled will delete them in the cloud as well and won't free up space since the photos will simply be moved to the recently deleted folder.

It seems like the only way to free up space would be to turn off iCloud Photos, then delete all the photos on the device, then turn iCloud photos back on and switch it to optimized mode. That's horribly anti-user friendly so I assume there must be a better way.

Any ideas?

 

[s2mikey]

Is there any way to free up space used by photos when iCloud Photos is turned on? Deleting the photos with iCloud Photos enabled will delete them in the cloud as well and won't free up space since the photos will simply be moved to the recently deleted folder.

It seems like the only way to free up space would be to turn off iCloud Photos, then delete all the photos on the device, then turn iCloud photos back on and switch it to optimized mode. That's horribly anti-user friendly so I assume there must be a better way.

Any ideas?

Hmmmm. Doesn't Optimize help with the memory footprint required for the photos? I thought that was the whole point of it? It should free up space.

 

[Zetaprime]

After reading this article:

http://www.iclarified.com/45581/dee...es-reportedly-holding-back-icloud-development

You might want to pass on iCloud Photo Library until they get their act together. No wonder I had so much trouble when I tried to use it.

 

[Morac]

Hmmmm. Doesn't Optimize help with the memory footprint required for the photos? I thought that was the whole point of it? It should free up space.

It only seems to apply to photos taken on other devices (i.e. photos that need to download). Photos already locally stored aren't affected by that setting. I did read somewhere though that it can take 2 weeks for that setting to take effect, but that makes no sense.

 

[sdilley14]

It only seems to apply to photos taken on other devices (i.e. photos that need to download). Photos already locally stored aren't affected by that setting. I did read somewhere though that it can take 2 weeks for that setting to take effect, but that makes no sense.

Photos that are stored locally will be "optimized" as well if you choose to turn on that setting.

However, you may want to be careful. I ran into some issues a couple weeks ago where I would turn on "optimize" and everything would work as it is supposed to (full res photos get uploaded to iCloud, optimized low-res photos stay on the device). Then after a few days, for some unknown reason, the full-res photos stored in iCloud got switched out for the optimized versions. I checked on both my iPhone and on icloud.com via web browser. About half my pictures on iCloud were tiny, compressed versions of the originals for some reason (on both my iPhone where the "optimized" version was supposed to be, as well as on iCloud Photo Library when I would log in and browse photos via web browser). I never did figure out why that happened. And maybe it has been fixed by now? For me I'm just going to keep all of my full-res pictures stored locally for now.

Luckily I backed up all of my photos on my MacBook before going through all of this.

 

[Dino F]

Photos that are stored locally will be "optimized" as well if you choose to turn on that setting.

However, you may want to be careful. I ran into some issues a couple weeks ago where I would turn on "optimize" and everything would work as it is supposed to (full res photos get uploaded to iCloud, optimized low-res photos stay on the device). Then after a few days, for some unknown reason, the full-res photos stored in iCloud got switched out for the optimized versions. I checked on both my iPhone and on icloud.com via web browser. About half my pictures on iCloud were tiny, compressed versions of the originals for some reason (on both my iPhone where the "optimized" version was supposed to be, as well as on iCloud Photo Library when I would log in and browse photos via web browser). I never did figure out why that happened. And maybe it has been fixed by now? For me I'm just going to keep all of my full-res pictures stored locally for now.

Luckily I backed up all of my photos on my MacBook before going through all of this.

....you have to remember that iCloud Photo Library is STILL in Beta so of course, there are gonna be things which don't work properly.

 

[iososx]

I've never seen photo storage so convoluted

Apple has the world's best marketing, they make everything Apple sound simple, magical and special. Sadly reality is they struggle mightily with Cloud Services. It's an area they simply don't understand nor have they shown true interest beyond the hype.

Give them another five years to figure it out, but for now it's extremely limited, sometimes unreliable and a dangerous place to put your valuable files. Especially when their are many fine free or very low cost alternatives that are proven, easy and safe.

Where Dropbox and Evernote and others shine Apple fails miserably. At least that is my first hand experience and that of my friends.

 

[pbouwen]

Photos that are stored locally will be "optimized" as well if you choose to turn on that setting.

However, you may want to be careful. I ran into some issues a couple weeks ago where I would turn on "optimize" and everything would work as it is supposed to (full res photos get uploaded to iCloud, optimized low-res photos stay on the device). Then after a few days, for some unknown reason, the full-res photos stored in iCloud got switched out for the optimized versions. I checked on both my iPhone and on icloud.com via web browser. About half my pictures on iCloud were tiny, compressed versions of the originals for some reason (on both my iPhone where the "optimized" version was supposed to be, as well as on iCloud Photo Library when I would log in and browse photos via web browser). I never did figure out why that happened. And maybe it has been fixed by now? For me I'm just going to keep all of my full-res pictures stored locally for now.

Luckily I backed up all of my photos on my MacBook before going through all of this.

Same here!
Except for the backup part, I didn't backup my photos first.
So now I'm stuck with an iCloud Photo Library full of iPhone 6 optimized versions and lost all of the full resolution photos.

So to all people using iCloud Photo Library; be warned!!

 

[sdilley14]

....you have to remember that iCloud Photo Library is STILL in Beta so of course, there are gonna be things which don't work properly.

Well of course - that's why I backed everything up. And I'm not saying iCloud Photo Library is awful and useless - just giving a warning to others so they don't go through the same ordeal I went through.

I'm sure they'll get this all figured out sooner than later. But until then, proceed with caution.

----------

Same here!
Except for the backup part, I didn't backup my photos first.
So now I'm stuck with an iCloud Photo Library full of iPhone 6 optimized versions and lost all of the full resolution photos.

So to all people using iCloud Photo Library; be warned!!

1. I'm a little relieved to hear this as you are the ONLY other person, besides myself, that I've heard about this happening to - so it's good to see I'm not the only one!

2. I'm very sorry this happened to you.

My only hope is that they will get this issue ironed eventually, and when they do, those "optimized" photos being stored in iCloud will magically revert back to the original, full-res images.

My "stop gap" for saving space on my phone between now and when iCloud Photo Library goes from Beta to "final", has been to use Photo Stream - though from what I understand Photo Stream only allows 1000 photos to be stored. But I have found it to be a good way to keep full res photos stored in the cloud while saving space on my device. But my entire photo library is only 500MB so I just decided to keep everything stored locally for now, turned "optimization" off, and enabled IPL. So far all of the photos being stored on IPL have remained "full-res".

 

[Zetaprime]

I don't understand iCloud Photo Library

Apple has the world's best marketing, they make everything Apple sound simple, magical and special. Sadly reality is they struggle mightily with Cloud Services. It's an area they simply don't understand nor have they shown true interest beyond the hype.

Give them another five years to figure it out, but for now it's extremely limited, sometimes unreliable and a dangerous place to put your valuable files. Especially when their are many fine free or very low cost alternatives that are proven, easy and safe.

Where Dropbox and Evernote and others shine Apple fails miserably. At least that is my first hand experience and that of my friends.

Given the management troubles plaguing the whole project (see link in my prior post) only a fool would trust his photos to ICPL. However as long as you have them all backed up elsewhere I don't suppose it can do much harm, providing you can get it to work, which I was never able to do.