iCloud Photos Library stucks and issues

[grapunzel]

Overall I'm not super happy with the status of the iCloud Photo Library Beta...

I have restored my iPhone (iOS 8.1.3) from an iCloud backup and it has been stuck in "downloading xxx" for 3 days, with the same amount of photos. I have tried to turn iCloud Library off, or restart the device, but nothing changes.

On top of that, photos store on the cloud on iOS 8 are completely broke: 90% of them are all empty, and if I tap on one, it start loading for a quarter and then freezes.

Also, on the Photo Mac app, while it has uploaded all my 50k photos, it doesn't sync properly with my iOS devices: if I delete something on my iPhone, it doesn't get deleted on my Mac (even if I deleting the pics from the "recent delete" folder).

The result is a not consistent experience, and not proper sync between devices. And this should be the main feature.

I know it's a beta, but this is pretty painful... And I not sure at this stage Apple will address these issues. If it doesn't, I think it's a pretty big fall on their side. :/

Anyone in the same boat?
Thanks

 

[ces1965]

I'm having the same problems. The Mac photos app works fine and the upload of my 46k photos library worked great. It took 3 days but that's to be expected for a 500gb library.

It's the sync to my iPhone and iPad that won't work completely. Many photos are missing. Albums are empty. FYI I'm using device optimized in the iOS devices

One strange thing is that the phone says it needs to UPLOAD 33k photos. Why? Shouldn't it be downloading photos from icloud? If it needs to upload something like maybe the device optimized ones for backup, how about doing that AFTER the downloading of the photos so I could actually use this.

Also, the phone insists on downloading older stuff before the most recent additions are added. This stops me from using my iPad or iPhone to view and edit the most recent stuff. Again, if the download (and mysterious upload) wasn't taking so long and getting stuck, this wouldn't be a problem. But as is, I can do nothing with my recent photos on my iOS devices (when they were originally imported into the Mac from my Fuji cameras) until the whole initial import of photos onto the iOS devices going back to 2000 is done apparently.

Another thing - you'd think overnight it would work hard to download (and upload) photos from the phone. Nope - background processing is minimal to zero. Nothing much seems to happen unless the photos app is in the foreground on the iPhone. Tonight I'm going to turn off auto lock, plug in the phone, and leave the photos app in the foreground and see if that breaks through the logjam.

Apple is making this all or nothing too - if there was an option to just put the most recent X years of stuff in the cloud then these problems might not exist. Instead it doesn't currently work for larger libraries.

I do realize this is all beta. But Apple should not put this out for general release until larger libraries actually work. And if the architecture can't handle larger libraries then they should limit the max size library for now in the cloud and allow the remainder to be stored locally on devices

 

[grapunzel]

Yep, I hear you man.
I noticed that if I look at the year view, and zoom into the area without any thumbnails preview, than if I load one photo, it will load the rest of the moment.

This is very tedious, because it will take a while for me to go through all my photos (50k)!

Alos, not sure what is happening, but on my iPhone I was getting "download 2000 photos", now it's "upload 37.000". Why???

Overall, the Mac photo app works well and smooth and all. But iOS with large library doesn't really work with iCloud... I feel like the problem is server and iOS 8.
I hope they will fix it before the public release.

 

[grapunzel]

I have some update:
basically all my iOS devices were syncing every time they were plugged in charge.
Meanwhile the process went fast and smooth on my Photos app on Mac, on iOS things are different: since I have a gigantic library, it tooks more than one week to properly sync everything.

I left my iOS devices sync at night, for a week! I don't know why it must take soooooo long, but right now I have my iPhone perfectly in sync with my Mac, with all my 50k photos and 90gb synced.
All thumbnails and preview are there, and it is actually pretty smooth to scroll through all the photos.

If you have a huge library, you just need to be patient.
It's not a smooth and good process though... no UI feedbacks, no control over download/upload (my internet speed was unusable when syncing)... lots of issue in general, not a typical Apple experience.

I hope they will smooth things out before the public release.

Cheers.

 

[Kai Hawaii]

Hi, I had similar issues. It is good that it looks that
everything is ok after the sync. marathon.

May I ask what happened to the "upload 37.000" issue,
as I turned off wifi on my iPhone currently because I have a similar message now, even after the first syncs were fine but it didn't finish the download.

 

[grapunzel]

I think you just need to be patient.
If it seems stuck, maybe it's uploading a video file.

I think when it say "download XXX" it's referring to the low res. If it seems stuck, try to restart the device (I did this couple of time during the week).

Hope it helps!

 

[Kai Hawaii]

Did you mean "uploading"? When it first downloaded around half of the photos in Lowres, it suddenly changed from downloading to uploading on my iPad. It could be true that the low resolution previews are generated on the iPad and not on the server. If so, in that case the server is not involved in any image processing at all. But that also mean that your previews will count as cloud storage and so your real database size will be increased by around 10% at least.