iCloud Photo Library Turned Itself Off

[Sital]

When I upgraded to Sierra (currently on 10.12.2) I decided to move to iCloud Photo Library. Everything went smoothly and I've been using it on both my Mac and iPhone without issue for over a month.

Yesterday I imported a photo into Photos and waited for it to appear on my phone. When it hadn't as of this morning, I did a little digging and discovered that the photo was in My Photo Stream. Looking in both System Preferences>iCloud and Photos>Preferences I discovered that iCloud Photo Library was now unchecked and My Photo Stream was enabled. iCloud Photo Library is still enabled on my iPhone however.

I enabled iCloud Photo Library on my Mac and then got a popup window telling me to upgrade my iCloud storage. I'm currently on the 50GB plan with about 20GB free on iCloud. The popup window is telling me that my Mac is storing about 36GB of photos and videos, but I think since I only have 20GB free it won't turn iCloud Photo Library back on. The thing is I have only 20GB available because my Photos library is already on iCloud! Not counting the photo library, I'm using less that 5GB of storage so the 50GB plan is more than enough.

Basically, I'm not sure how to proceed and don't want to do anything stupid that will end up deleting my photos (yes, I do have a backup). I tried rebooting my Mac and was thinking about reinstalling Sierra, but I wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions first. Thanks.

 

[Big Stevie]

My photo stream has stopped working also. My MacBook hard drive is almost full and I hadn't considered that this might be the reason why. I'm going to free up some space and see if photo stream starts working.

 

[Sital]

I was able to resolve my problem. I ended up calling Apple and they were perplexed by my issue. They had me create a new photo library and make it the default. Once I did that I was able to re-enable iCloud Photo Library and then all my photos downloaded to the new photo library.

 

[high3r]

I also noticed this morning that iCloud Photo Library turned itself off on my iPhone. Then I checked my iPad and Mac and it was disabled on those devices as well. I have the 200GB storage tier and my photos are approx 66GB. So I checked Storage and iCloud Usage on my iPhone and to my surprise my Photos have turned into Documents and take up 66GB and there's no iCloud Photo Library. I called support where my problem is now escalated to Engineering. They say it is going to take 1-2 days for them to wipe that phantom 66GB Documents thing and I then I can re-enable the Photo Library. With my sh..ty upload speed it's going to take atleast a week to upload all my photos again. Yeah, "it just works".

 

[W M R]

After spending months of work and uploading a library of 28000 photos to iCloud, my whole iCloud Photo Library suddenly disappeared! I didn't change any settings or moved anything at all! The iCloud space still seems to be used though and there seam to be 150 GB of documents on iCloud Drive, that didn't exist before my Photo Library disappeared...

 

[high3r]

After spending months of work and uploading a library of 28000 photos to iCloud, my whole iCloud Photo Library suddenly disappeared! I didn't change any settings or moved anything at all! The iCloud space still seems to be used though and there seam to be 150 GB of documents on iCloud Drive, that didn't exist before my Photo Library disappeared...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/icloud-photo-library-bug.2032693/#post-24310417

We are not alone unfortunately.

 

[W M R]

I also noticed this morning that iCloud Photo Library turned itself off on my iPhone. Then I checked my iPad and Mac and it was disabled on those devices as well. I have the 200GB storage tier and my photos are approx 66GB. So I checked Storage and iCloud Usage on my iPhone and to my surprise my Photos have turned into Documents and take up 66GB and there's no iCloud Photo Library. I called support where my problem is now escalated to Engineering. They say it is going to take 1-2 days for them to wipe that phantom 66GB Documents thing and I then I can re-enable the Photo Library. With my sh..ty upload speed it's going to take atleast a week to upload all my photos again. Yeah, "it just works".

How did you proceed? Did they only wipe your 66GB, or was it possible to save your library and use it again?

 

[high3r]

How did you proceed? Did they only wipe your 66GB, or was it possible to save your library and use it again?

I haven't yet received any replies from Apple yet and I still have that 66GB. Going to call them tomorrow and complain furiously.

 

[W M R]

I haven't yet received any replies from Apple yet and I still have that 66GB. Going to call them tomorrow and complain furiously.

I called them too. They told me on Friday, that nobody works there until Monday and it would take until Wednesday until I would get a reply...

The Problem is, that I optimized the storage on my Mac and I only have about 25 % of my photos left on my devices, since the rest is supposed to be safely stored in iCloud...

 

[high3r]

I called them too. They told me on Friday, that nobody works there until Monday and it would take until Wednesday until I would get a reply...

The Problem is, that I optimized the storage on my Mac and I only have about 25 % of my photos left on my devices, since the rest is supposed to be safely stored in iCloud...

It'd be great if they could "convert" it back to photos but luckily I have my library backed up at multiple locations. I hope they can do it for you too.

 

[W M R]

It'd be great if they could "convert" it back to photos but luckily I have my library backed up at multiple locations. I hope they can do it for you too.

Apple simply deleted my whole library! I won't use iCloud anymore, since the risk of data loss is too high...

 

[cc2572]

Yes, this has happened to me twice now. iCloud photo sharing, has turned itself off twice. I have contacted support numerous times and all they can offer is to create a new library and download everything AGAIN. I have now wasted 3 days trying to get this fixed and downloading only for the same thing to happen. Worst part of all of this is I am currently traveling out of the country and do not have a reliable internet connection in my hotel and need to go to a specific location to do this and must sit there during the exhausting 12 hour process.
DO NOT TRUST iCloud or APPLE, there products simply do not perform as advertised and have some type of obvious Bug.
Their Support is a Joke, it use to be good Years ago , but now is worthless !
Apple has gone to Sh*? so very sad...,