iCloud Sucks for Married People

[whodatrr]

But it goes beyond easy photos - Apple is now pushing everything to their overpriced iCloud. A few years ago, iPhoto was great. we could maintain a central library locally, where the whole family could upload their photos to the family server. Now, that capability has been handicapped by apple. Now, all photos in the Photo all, that are to be shared, have to be uploaded to iCloud @ $10mo per TB. Gone are the days when families could maintain a local server with pics and videos, now we all must push them to Apple's cloud.

This was the final straw that proved me to investigate moving from Apple's ecosystem, BTW. No, not therapy photos, but the mandated move to iCloud.

I guess I'm getting old, or I have a different view of 'intimate', but if it's of anything normally hidden by what passes for a bathing suit, it shouldn't be on ANYTHING that could ever be potentially accessed publicly. Period...

If you have to take that picture, you really need to keep in mind, and this isn't aimed at you, who could possibly ever see that. The wife and I had a few pics that were 'racy', but we took the pictures on a separate camera, and put them on a computer that wasn't accessible by anyone else. We eventually deleted them. Our memories are good enough...

I remember an article that hit the news about a female teacher that borrowed the school video camera while on a 'sleep away' field trip, and she apparently 'got frisky' with the other (male) chaperone, and they taped their amorous session in the hotel at the end of the tape of the kiddies at the museum and seeing the sites. Ah, but the school board wanted to see the tape. and, well, they got a lot more than an eyeful...

But I'd shield my kids from the violence in the movies now a days, rather than good wholesome sex and nudity. I find shooting people, cutting people, drowning people, burning people, car crashing people, dismembering people WAY more disturbing than racy pics of mom and dad. But still...

Should Apple 'fix' Photos? Yeah. I'd LOVE to have the ability to have more than one database so the funny, or work related pictures can be subdivided and not lumped in with all of the other ones. It seems with the latest 'upgrade' that Apple really just cut some features, or hid them, and as a result, Photos, and the streaming/iCloud service is a mess... I don't use it. I probably never will. To darn many 'other' classification pictures to wade through...

But then...

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

But it goes beyond easy photos - Apple is now pushing everything to their overpriced iCloud. A few years ago, iPhoto was great. we could maintain a central library locally, where the whole family could upload their photos to the family server. Now, that capability has been handicapped by apple. Now, all photos in the Photo all, that are to be shared, have to be uploaded to iCloud @ $10mo per TB. Gone are the days when families could maintain a local server with pics and videos, now we all must push them to Apple's cloud.

This was the final straw that proved me to investigate moving from Apple's ecosystem, BTW. No, not therapy photos, but the mandated move to iCloud.

I just said 'No' when the choice came up. Although I am afraid of something doing it to me, without my knowledge, or understanding...

 

[whsbuss]

Been using WD MyCloud for my photos/videos - not a seamless as iCloud but it works very well.

 

[Fuchal]

But it goes beyond easy photos - Apple is now pushing everything to their overpriced iCloud. A few years ago, iPhoto was great. we could maintain a central library locally, where the whole family could upload their photos to the family server. Now, that capability has been handicapped by apple. Now, all photos in the Photo all, that are to be shared, have to be uploaded to iCloud @ $10mo per TB. Gone are the days when families could maintain a local server with pics and videos, now we all must push them to Apple's cloud.

This was the final straw that proved me to investigate moving from Apple's ecosystem, BTW. No, not therapy photos, but the mandated move to iCloud.

I dont think this is correct at all, you have no obligation to sync to iCloud Photo Library.

 

[whodatrr]

True, you don't have to.

But the difference is that with the old iPhoto app, sharing albums was easy locally. You could make a central iPhoto library, using the GUI, thereby allowing clients to upload and download pics/videos from the Family library. This was a frequently-used capability, in our household.

Now that capability has been disabled via the GUI, replaced by sharing over iCloud. You can still, however, navigate to the library via the File Manager and share the photo library via file permissions, but here's the catch (doing this is not officially supported by Apple). I actually discussed this with the Apple Support team, after this change was implemented, and they said that there's a good chance sharing the library in this manner can result in corrupted metadata (eg. two people simultaneously making changes to the same pic or album).

Anyhow, the net is that Apple has chosen to all but disable local photo/video library sharing, in favor of doing so over iCloud. Yes, you can still jump through a few hoops and do it, but doing so may result in a corrupted library, and the lack of support in the GUI makes it more difficult for novice users (eg. kids) to leverage.

While this may seem like an insignificant change for many, it was a massive one for me. And it's a big reason I'm now typing this on a PC. True, we are not obligated to use iClud. But the on-premise alternatives that were previously supported are gradually being phased-out.

I dont think this is correct at all, you have no obligation to sync to iCloud Photo Library.

 

[IGI2]

So to sum up (at least my thoughts!), Apple should somehow re-organize and re-think their approach to Photos app and introduce some neat and explicitly described options (what counts against iCloud quota, what not, who sees this, who sees that, etc.).

 

[BrianBaughn]

In my experience the average user doesn't understand how iPhoto, Photos, iCloud Photo Library, My Photo Stream, or iCloud Photo Sharing works. It's easy to see why!

 

[colodane]

In my experience the average user doesn't understand how iPhoto, Photos, iCloud Photo Library, My Photo Stream, or iCloud Photo Sharing works. It's easy to see why!

Truer words were never spoken! A casual user of the camera and photo functions (such as me) faces a relearning experience each time they need to use this stuff. I have a need to deal with storing/sharing/organizing/backing up photos perhaps once every six months and find it all quite confusing, even though I'm intelligent and knowledgeable about engineering hardware issues. Apple's penchant for changing the names and functionality of these things over time certainly hasn't helped any.

 

[AFEPPL]

Ignore the haters around 1 device, 1 account. Screw that.
This is how i do it for the family, around 20 devices all in..

You can stop the calls between devices by turning off iCloud drive on one device. That stops the call logs moving.
SMS - each person gets there own address, your just add it in the setting and remove the master one (yours).
Movies and purchases use the same address (yours) and you can turn on restrictions to stop purchases or use age content control.
Photos - turn off iCloud photos on the device and they are just backed up with iCloud backup. You can also send or invite family members with the sharing function.

Works fine, all purchases are central, all devices get their own messages only but overall a shared central core.

 

[rkanaga]

Ignore the haters around 1 device, 1 account. Screw that.
This is how i do it for the family, around 20 devices all in..

You can stop the calls between devices by turning off iCloud drive on one device. That stops the call logs moving.
SMS - each person gets there own address, your just add it in the setting and remove the master one (yours).
Movies and purchases use the same address (yours) and you can turn on restrictions to stop purchases or use age content control.
Photos - turn off iCloud photos on the device and they are just backed up with iCloud backup. You can also send or invite family members with the sharing function.

Works fine, all purchases are central, all devices get their own messages only but overall a shared central core.

 

[rkanaga]

Oops posted too soon!

My wife and I used to use photo stream to upload photos from our iPhones to a single family iPhoto library.

Now with iCloud Photo Library we can't do this. We need to have individual primary apple ids on our phones so we can have separate iCloud Drive folders so now her phone syncs automatically and I have to upload my photos via a lightning cable just like the old days!

Really Apple needs to sort this out! All that is needed is the ability to select a secondary iCloud account on your iPhone for use with photo library!

Google photos does this much better!

 

[JackieInCo]

I have been using multiple iPhone using the same iCloud ID for several years with no problems. My contacts stayed in sync but recently, when one phone gets a call, the same number shows as having been called on all iPhones even though those phones have different phone numbers. This just started happening very recently and it's never happened in all these years till the last few weeks. Makes it really hard who the caller may have been sometimes.

So I just read that iCloud Drive will stop that. But it's not. I just checked on one of the phones and iCloud drive is off and it still shows two phone calls received today that that iPhone didn't get, that phone doesn't even have an active sim card.

Any other ideas?

 

[AZhappyjack]

Your iCloud ID should be personal.
Your iTunes account can be shared among family for purchases.

Keep them separate.
Easy enough to email / sms iCal stuff.

Yes, iCloud should be personal... but there should be a way to share Contacts. I have solutions for Calendars, Bookmarks, etc... but Contacts is just not possible. IMO, it's a major oversight by Apple.

 

[iPhone1]

I went many years with the same Apple ID for my wife and I. The Apple Music launch was the event that made me create Apple ID's for my family. It was painful and not simple but it works out better for us in the end. What I don't like is that Apple does not make it easy to know which songs/movies/apps your family has already purchased. You basically have to go into the purchased area of the App Store or iTunes Store in order to avoid purchasing the same medial more than once. Even something like a shared iCloud storage plan would be a lot better than my current method of having to pay for two individual plans where we really only need a shared 50GB for our needs. I do like it better than sharing the same Apple ID but I can't see why people would do it since sharing is just so much easier to handle.