iPhone re-uploading entire iCloud Photo Library. Again!

[mavis]

Hey guys,

Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions for this.

For the second time in as many months, my iPhone X has arbitrarily decided to start re-uploading my entire 22,000 photo library to iCloud, at a snail's pace (100Mbit fiber at home, but the phone only manages to upload 10-20 items per hour) ... Last time it happened, I had "Optimize Storage" disabled, so after restoring (rather than waiting literally months for the upload to complete) I enabled Optimize Storage (thinking that, if the originals weren't on the phone, there would be far less to upload if it happened again). Unfortunately, it's at it again, and it's doing the entire library again. I've made no changes to my albums or keywords or anything, in the past week or so, but I woke up this morning to find my iPhone re-uploading everything (for no apparent reason). In the five hours since, the progress has actually been negative: at 4:17am it was at 21,510 items remaining, and now at 9:12 it's at 21,922. Although to be fair, it's been stuck at 21,922 for about two hours now, despite two reboots, turning wifi off and then back on, pausing and then resuming the uploads, and force-closing the Photos app twice.

Any ideas? I'd switch to another cloud storage solution but the integration of iCloud Photo Library with all of my devices makes that a 'solution' I'd rather avoid. I also do a lot of tagging in Photos on the Mac (geotagging, time/date corrections, keywords, etc) and haven't found a way to easily sync those changes with solutions like Google Photos, besides deleting the original images and re-uploading, which is obviously less than ideal. Oh and no - I haven't done any re-tagging or metadata updates to my photos in over a week, so that's not what precipitated yet another arbitrary re-upload.

If anyone has any suggestions or solutions, I'd love to hear them.

 

[eyeseeyou]

I’ve been noticing that pics u take are instantly uploaded to iCloud and if I want to view then or edit them I have to download them first

 

[mavis]

ok so a quick update. After about eight hours, it's managed to get through 250 pictures (just did a speed test and I'm getting 82Mbps down and 46Mbps up) ... This isn't right. And it's the second time in the past month it's done this. Am I the only one this is happening to?

edit: added a video, complete with fun narration. It literally jumps between upload complete, and uploading 20,989 images REPEATEDLY, in this video. And this isn't the first time it's done this (last time, I just restored the phone after waiting several days, as it was on target to finally finish in about three months).

 

[0014]

I would contact Apple support.

I've had issues with Mail, iMessages and Photo's before on my Mac, iPad and Phone. Bottom line is that iCloud.com is the master for everything.

So get on to support (I spent 2hrs on the phone to a level 2 engineer once!) and hopefully they will help you. Something is broken somewhere and it will be on the device that is conflicting with the info stored on iCloud.Com.

 

[loyking]

Hey guys,

Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions for this.

For the second time in as many months, my iPhone X has arbitrarily decided to start re-uploading my entire 22,000 photo library to iCloud, at a snail's pace (100Mbit fiber at home, but the phone only manages to upload 10-20 items per hour) ... Last time it happened, I had "Optimize Storage" disabled, so after restoring (rather than waiting literally months for the upload to complete) I enabled Optimize Storage (thinking that, if the originals weren't on the phone, there would be far less to upload if it happened again). Unfortunately, it's at it again, and it's doing the entire library again. I've made no changes to my albums or keywords or anything, in the past week or so, but I woke up this morning to find my iPhone re-uploading everything (for no apparent reason). In the five hours since, the progress has actually been negative: at 4:17am it was at 21,510 items remaining, and now at 9:12 it's at 21,922. Although to be fair, it's been stuck at 21,922 for about two hours now, despite two reboots, turning wifi off and then back on, pausing and then resuming the uploads, and force-closing the Photos app twice.

Any ideas? I'd switch to another cloud storage solution but the integration of iCloud Photo Library with all of my devices makes that a 'solution' I'd rather avoid. I also do a lot of tagging in Photos on the Mac (geotagging, time/date corrections, keywords, etc) and haven't found a way to easily sync those changes with solutions like Google Photos, besides deleting the original images and re-uploading, which is obviously less than ideal. Oh and no - I haven't done any re-tagging or metadata updates to my photos in over a week, so that's not what precipitated yet another arbitrary re-upload.

If anyone has any suggestions or solutions, I'd love to hear them.

I am having exactly the same problem as you. I'm on an iPhone 8 running the latest version of iOS11.

I have tried doing the following:

1) Disabling iCloud Photo Library on my phone and re-enabling it. That didn't seem to help and the total number of photos/videos to upload (36000+ on mine) dropped to 31000+ with 5000 seemingly missing

2) Erasing my iPhone and restoring from an iCloud backup. Still the same problem

3) As a last resort, I disabled iCloud Photo Library on my phone and connected my iPhone to the Mac via Image Capture to delete all the pictures on the iPhone manually -- about 9000 of them. Strangely, there are still about 20000 photos that are blank with blank thumbnails left on the iPhone which cannot be viewed via Image Capture. I spent another 2 hours manually deleting these blank files from the iPhone via the Photos app.

4) When I managed to empty the camera roll on my iPhone, I re-enabled iCloud Photo Library. Under Moments in Photos, I am getting an "Updating..." message. I have read that plugging in the phone and leaving it connected to Wifi should allow things to restore. Did that overnight but still nothing in the morning. The screen displays "Updating..." but I am seeing hardly any network activity from the phone on my router.

The strange thing is that iCloud Photo Library is working fine on my Ipad Pro (also on the same version of iOS11) as well as on my Macbook and iMac (where the entire library is downloaded).

Any solution or advice would be most welcome!

 

[mavis]

The strange thing is that iCloud Photo Library is working fine on my Ipad Pro (also on the same version of iOS11) as well as on my Macbook and iMac (where the entire library is downloaded).

Wow, exactly the same situation here. Exactly the same devices, and the same problem.

I was going to post something like 'just wait it out - mine is at 11,000 now so it's finally making progress!' but alas, it has now jumped back to the whole lot - 21,967. Seriously, WTF?! I may just let it restore tonight - this is ridiculous. This will be the third time I've had to restore my iPhone X, and the second time for this same issue (which doesn't seem to be triggered by anything specific). So damn frustrating.

 

[doubletap]

Wow.. As someone who has been struggling with Photos (macOS and iOS) lately, I feel your pain. Have you tried to completely reset your phone and start as new instead of trying to restore from a backup?

 

[LovingTeddy]

First thing I did when I setup my iPhone (before switch to Android) and iPad is disable whole iCloud thing.

Photos and videos are backed up by Google Photos, it worked flawlessly. It knows when I took new photos, it tells me there are duplicate photos, it also offers be way to increase available storage.

Bookmarks, notes, contact, passwords are stored with Google Chrome.

Everything Google has to offer worked flawlessly.

 

[loyking]

Wow.. As someone who has been struggling with Photos (macOS and iOS) lately, I feel your pain. Have you tried to completely reset your phone and start as new instead of trying to restore from a backup?

I am reluctant to do that as it would mean losing the Apple Health data that I have accumulated over the past 2 years.

The next step I'm contemplating is calling Apple Support and possibly looking for a Genius at the local Apple Store.

 

[mman454]

The biggest thing is to keep the phone is plugged in to charge. If you are sure all the photos are in the cloud you could try turning iCloud Photos off, then manually delete all the photos off the phone. Don’t delete the albums, they should disappear on their own after doing this. Once you have seen the phone regain all of the storage space taken by the photos, reboot the phone and leave it for a few hours. Then turn iCloud photos back on.

Reason I say to leave it for a few hours is because while trying to breathe just a little bit of life back into an iPad 2 I turned iCloud Photos back on right away and it decided to delete several albums from iCloud. The pictures were all there, but the albums were gone from all devices.

 

[embotix]

ok so a quick update. After about eight hours, it's managed to get through 250 pictures (just did a speed test and I'm getting 82Mbps down and 46Mbps up) ... This isn't right. And it's the second time in the past month it's done this. Am I the only one this is happening to?

edit: added a video, complete with fun narration. It literally jumps between upload complete, and uploading 20,989 images REPEATEDLY, in this video. And this isn't the first time it's done this (last time, I just restored the phone after waiting several days, as it was on target to finally finish in about three months).

I'm having the exact same issue. It became more apparent recently because I noticed that photos I took on my iPhone X were not showing up on my iPad Pro, and vice versa. After some basic tests and checking between the X, iPad and iCloud.com, I was able to verify that the iPad is able to sync no problem between itself and iCloud, but the X is not.

I've tried turning iCloud Photo Library off, and back on, on the X, and it didn't help.

What I'm doing right now is turning off the Display sleep time (set it to Never), leaving the X plugged in, and open to the Photos app. Going to let this "little f--ker" run all day for as long as I can to see if it ever catches up and gets back in sync.

If this doesn't resolve it, I *might* try an iCloud restore, but I have a bad feeling this is one of those things that may require a fresh install, which is going to be such a PITA.

 

[mman454]

I'm having the exact same issue. It became more apparent recently because I noticed that photos I took on my iPhone X were not showing up on my iPad Pro, and vice versa. After some basic tests and checking between the X, iPad and iCloud.com, I was able to verify that the iPad is able to sync no problem between itself and iCloud, but the X is not.

I've tried turning iCloud Photo Library off, and back on, on the X, and it didn't help.

What I'm doing right now is turning off the Display sleep time (set it to Never), leaving the X plugged in, and open to the Photos app. Going to let this "little f--ker" run all day for as long as I can to see if it ever catches up and gets back in sync.

If this doesn't resolve it, I *might* try an iCloud restore, but I have a bad feeling this is one of those things that may require a fresh install, which is going to be such a PITA.

In my experience this process works best when the phone is locked and plugged into power.

 

[mavis]

Wow.. As someone who has been struggling with Photos (macOS and iOS) lately, I feel your pain. Have you tried to completely reset your phone and start as new instead of trying to restore from a backup?

I guess that will be my next step. I left the phone plugged in and sitting right next to the router overnight (just to make sure it had the best signal possible) and after letting it run all night, it's managed to process a whopping 268 pictures. I'd be content to just let it do it's thing, but after watching it get all the way down to 11,000 yesterday, only for it to then jump back to 21,967 and then stay there for eight ****ing hours, I'm thinking it would be a complete waste of time. Unfortunately, I do have to work - don't have time to restore it now. Plus the fact that a restore actually takes ages (due to my using two AppleIDs - one for Japan and one for the US) ... There's a lot of switching regions, changing settings, switching back, etc - all of which has to be done manually. It's like a 50-step procedure, unfortunately.

First thing I did when I setup my iPhone (before switch to Android) and iPad is disable whole iCloud thing.

Photos and videos are backed up by Google Photos, it worked flawlessly. It knows when I took new photos, it tells me there are duplicate photos, it also offers be way to increase available storage.

Bookmarks, notes, contact, passwords are stored with Google Chrome.

Everything Google has to offer worked flawlessly.

Yes, I have to say I've been impressed by Google Photos so far. It's amazing how well that app works, especially considering it's a third-party app that isn't baked into the OS like the native Photos app is. If only it let me easily change geotagging data and time/date after pictures have been uploaded (like I can with third-party apps on the phone, or natively with Photos.app on the Mac, which then syncs back to the iPhone - when syncing is actually working, lol) ...

Although I'm now noticing discrepancies with other iCloud-synced data as well, and not just with the iPhone - I added a birthday for one of my contacts yesterday, on my iMac, and am not seeing the birthday added on any other device. I've tried disabling syncing for the address book on all of my devices, one-by-one, but the birthday (and, it turns out, that contact's street address as well) refuse to sync. I can move them to other address book groups, and THAT change syncs immediately, but I can't add fields and have them sync. Seriously, Apple? WTF. Google has this nailed.

I am reluctant to do that as it would mean losing the Apple Health data that I have accumulated over the past 2 years.

The next step I'm contemplating is calling Apple Support and possibly looking for a Genius at the local Apple Store.

Actually, Health Data is synced to iCloud now. So it would still be available after a clean install, as long as you've signed into your iCloud account. Of course, given my ongoing experience with iCloud's syncing abilities, I don't actually trust it for ****.
[doublepost=1516737647][/doublepost]

The biggest thing is to keep the phone is plugged in to charge. If you are sure all the photos are in the cloud you could try turning iCloud Photos off, then manually delete all the photos off the phone. Don’t delete the albums, they should disappear on their own after doing this. Once you have seen the phone regain all of the storage space taken by the photos, reboot the phone and leave it for a few hours. Then turn iCloud photos back on.

Reason I say to leave it for a few hours is because while trying to breathe just a little bit of life back into an iPad 2 I turned iCloud Photos back on right away and it decided to delete several albums from iCloud. The pictures were all there, but the albums were gone from all devices.

Ah, yes - the joy of disappearing albums. Yeah, I just went through this a month ago, the last time this iPhone X decided to re-upload my entire library for no apparent reason.

Last time this happened, I let my phone try to do it's thing for about three days, but since it never actually made any progress, I disabled iCloud entirely, rebooted, made sure iCloud was off, and then manually deleted all of my photos. The albums didn't go away (they were empty, at least) so I then deleted them, too. After rebooting and signing back into iCloud, all of my photos came back, but NOT the albums. Also missing, it turns out, were ALL of my keywords - hundreds of them, manually added over the years, in Photos.app on the Mac.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on the phone with Level 2 (?) tech support, and requested that they restore/rebuild my photo database. That process took about a week; when it was done, they called me and told me to sign back in. I did, and everything was ... STILL GONE. So I spent several days over the Christmas/New Years' holiday completely re-organizing my Photo Library, and now it's perfect. Well, perfect on every device except the iPhone X (which this thread details) ...

TLDR; never delete ALBUMS, even when you're not signed into iCloud. They'll disappear from all of your devices, forever, when you sign back in, which is completely ****ing ridiculous.

In my experience this process works best when the phone is locked and plugged into power.

Yeah, that what's I thought. But after leaving phone plugged in and sitting right next to the router overnight (just to make sure it had the best signal possible) and after letting it run all night, it only managed to process a whopping 268 pictures.

 

[embotix]

11.2.5 just came out - maybe, just maybe... it will fix this...

 

[Shirasaki]

First thing I did when I setup my iPhone (before switch to Android) and iPad is disable whole iCloud thing.

Photos and videos are backed up by Google Photos, it worked flawlessly. It knows when I took new photos, it tells me there are duplicate photos, it also offers be way to increase available storage.

Bookmarks, notes, contact, passwords are stored with Google Chrome.

Everything Google has to offer worked flawlessly.

Which indicates you love android solutions more than Apple solutions.

 

[embotix]

Which indicates you love android solutions more than Apple solutions.

I'm no Google fan -- but I have to admit to using Google Photos, specifically, to help with my photo library management needs. The Google Photos iOS app is literally doing a better job right now of sync'ing my photos across my iOS devices. I originally started using Google Photos as a nice, free, backup to iCloud Photo Library. But because of this issue, it's literally the only way for me to easily get photos shared across my iOS devices right now.

On another note - so far, with the 11.2.5 patch installed, Photos has been continuously in "Updating..." mode. I'm hoping this is a good sign:

I noticed that OP had.. I think 20K plus items in his library. Maybe this is an issue only for larger libraries?

 

[laszlo182]

iCloud Photo Library is driving me crazy too. For me it instantly deletes original of every single photo as soon as it’s taken and saved. I take a photo in the office then open Photos to edit it and I have to wait for it to download.
Also it cannot cache. I open a photo, wait for it do download, then hit Edit, wait for it to download, then Done, Share, and I have to wait for it to download again!

I don’t get it because I have over 20GB free on my 64GB iPhone 8.

Lastly, those downloads are getting slower and slower, no matter how fast my WiFi is. It’s been like this since iOS 11. (I have Optimise Storage option turned on, my library is over 160GB).

What I'm doing right now is turning off the Display sleep time (set it to Never), leaving the X plugged in, and open to the Photos app.

I wouldn’t do that with X’s OLED.

 

[LovingTeddy]

Which indicates you love android solutions more than Apple solutions.

The only Apple product I have and using are MacBook Air (loaded with Windows 10) and iPad Pro (brought 2 of them for me and my wife). Nothing beats iPad Pro yet, though I am open to Surface Pro as well. I brought the iPad Pro from Costco, 90 days return period. Will try for 3 months and see if I can get use to this.

Otherwise, I am all Windows and Android for now. Hard to think that 2 years ago, I am Apple only.

 

[embotix]

11.2.5 just came out - maybe, just maybe... it will fix this...

Didn't work.

iPhone X is showing 40,961 Photos, 1,580 Videos, while iPad Pro is showing 46,286 Photos, 1,869 Videos.

Fresh install... here I come...

 

[Shirasaki]

My issue is a bit different. I deleted a large number of photos through photos app on Mac, thinking changes will be applied to all devices but NO! It’s been 4 weeks since last deletion and photos app in Mac is still struggling to reflect the change to iCloud. Photos agent process takes up all CPU time but doesn’t do ****. Mac becomes laggy and unstable. After that, I give up and delete the SAME photos from my phone. This time

Didn't work.

iPhone X is showing 40,961 Photos, 1,580 Videos, while iPad Pro is showing 46,286 Photos, 1,869 Videos.

Fresh install... here I come...

icloud is super dead on this one.

 

[mavis]

My issue is a bit different. I deleted a large number of photos through photos app on Mac, thinking changes will be applied to all devices but NO! It’s been 4 weeks since last deletion and photos app in Mac is still struggling to reflect the change to iCloud. Photos agent process takes up all CPU time but doesn’t do ****. Mac becomes laggy and unstable. After that, I give up and delete the SAME photos from my phone. This time

icloud is super dead on this one.

I wonder why there hasn't been more pressure, internally, to fix these recurring and annoying issues. I mean, surely this sort of thing has happened either to someone in upper management at Apple, or one of their acquaintances...

 

[loyking]

TLDR; never delete ALBUMS, even when you're not signed into iCloud. They'll disappear from all of your devices, forever, when you sign back in, which is completely ****ing ridiculous.

.

Just to update...

I couldn't do anything to my iPhone at work except to plug it in and to connect to the spotty Wifi I have there for most of the day. Read the post about the latest iOS update and tried to install it, but got the warning that iCloud Backup was still trying to restore "media" to my phone and that I can only update iOS after that was complete.

When I got home and plugged in my phone and placing it next to my router, I waited for an hour for the Backup to complete "restoring media". Moments in Photos still appear to be stuck "updating" as well. Looking into my router admin pages, I realise that the iPhone was hardly transferring any traffic. Got fed-up and decided to do a reboot on the iPhone. The iPhone prompted me to install the iOS update which I declined. I got into iCloud Backup and realise that the restoration was complete (it allowed me to manually order a backup). I decided to go back into Photos and all of a sudden, my photo library started rebuilding itself from the cloud! So initial happiness... BUT... horrors of horrors.... all the albums (even those on my iMac and iPad Pro as well as on iCloud.com via a browser) were gone. I have read suggestions that I should let the photo library completely rebuild itself and the albums may come back but I am not too optimistic.

So the bottomline is that rebooting the device might work (for now at least *fingers crossed). If you did delete away photos on your device to force a re-sync from iCloud, keep your album structure intact or risk losing them, not only on the device, but across your entire iCloud synced devices. Losing the album structure is too much a big deal for me as I haven't really organised the pictures much (my serious photography resides in Lightroom) although it would be nice to get them back.

Will monitor the situation and see how the restoration goes in the meantime...

 

[Shirasaki]

I wonder why there hasn't been more pressure, internally, to fix these recurring and annoying issues. I mean, surely this sort of thing has happened either to someone in upper management at Apple, or one of their acquaintances...

I assume Apple will eventually solve this iCloud cluster**** issue after they invest into their own cloud solution. But when will this happen? One trillion dollar and let iCloud rot. Definitely not something we will like.

 

[loyking]

Will monitor the situation and see how the restoration goes in the meantime...

So this is getting ridiculous. The restore worked and I managed to get Moments in iPhone to reflect the same total number of photos and videos as indicated on the library on iCloud.com. In the process, I lost all the albums which I had on my devices.

Now on the iPhone, the Status under Moments continue to say updating. New photos that I take on the iPhone appears under both Moments and the All Photos album but refused to be uploaded to iCloud Photo Library and hence do not show up on the Photos app on both my iPad Pro and iMac. Nor do they show up on iCloud.com. What is strange also on the iPhone is that many old photos appear as blank thumbnails with a cloud icon. When I select these blank thumbnails, the iPhone attempts to load the actual photo but ends up showing a blank photo with a symbol of a circle around an exclamation mark. When I try to Edit this blank photo, I get an error message saying "Cannot Load Photo. There was an error loading this photo". The same photo downloads off iCloud.com website through Safari with no issues at all so I can only imagine that there's some connection issue between iOS on the iPhone and the iCloud photo library servers.

I have updated to iOS 11.2.5 (just released today) with no resolution of the problem.

This is getting really frustrating and not worth the monthly subscription fee I am paying for 2TB of storage on iCloud.

 

[mavis]

Looking into my router admin pages, I realise that the iPhone was hardly transferring any traffic. Got fed-up and decided to do a reboot on the iPhone.

THIS is probably what I find most annoying - you have to basically coddle the phone to get it to actually DO anything. It'll simply stop updating unless you re-boot; sometimes force-closing the Photos app does the trick, but usually it has to be a re-boot.

Anyway, I got tired of waiting on mine (36 hours into it, and it had only managed to process 300 pics or so) so I made a 'restore checklist' and by getting the timing/sequence right, I was able to get everything done - manually! - in about an hour (fifteen steps, on my list) ... So I set the phone up as new (not restoring from a backup) and re-paired my Apple Watch; fortunately Apple has made health and activity data sync with iCloud now so I got all of that back, and my photos have synced just fine. The folders and albums appeared last, but they did appear and are full now, and my keywords are still there as well so that's good. Basically the only thing I lost, through this method, were my iMessages - but they're on my iPad and iMac, so whenever Apple gets around to enabling iMessage in the Cloud, they'll sync.

Long story short: rather than mess with manually deleting pics from your phone - even while iCloud Photo Library is disabled! - it's probably easier/safer/faster to just restore your phone. Also, good job, Apple!