Hi,
I've been hesitant to jump aboard with iCloud Photo Library due to all the issues people have been having. Are most of the issues gone now or are people still having trouble?
I scanned through the first page here of related threads but thought it'd be better to ask a direct question instead!
Hi Tanax
Short answer: As of today, 8th January 2016 IPL is not yet a mature and reliable service. Mainly there are syncing problems that have already been reported in 2014 and that are not yet solved.
Long answer: For Xmas I bought a new iPhone and iPad for my wife and wanted to transfer ~11'000 photos from the old devices to the new ones using iCloud Photo Library (IPL). This turned out to be a 10 days odyssey, wasting hours with endless phone calls to a clueless Apple Support. In the end I had to achieve my goal with many try-and-error sessions and huge amounts of manual work.
I experienced and still experience the following issues:
1. Migrating both iOS devices to IPL with photos that were previously transferred with Photo Streams results in duplicate photos, i.e. all photos transferred via Photo Stream appear as duplicates in IPL.
2. When restoring an iOS device from iTunes and reconnecting it to IPL, the same photos are transferred to IPL again.
3. Photos that have previously being synced with iTunes are not supported by IPL, i.e. they will be deleted from the iOS device when you turn on IPL. Furthermore, Apple does not provide any way of transferring these photos from one iOS device to another. Apple also does not provide a tool to retrieve those photos and albums from the iOS device back to your computer. I was really shocked when I realized this, because my wife has ~9'000 photos taken with a digicam that she has synced with iTunes to her iPad and grouped in albums for more than 4 years. All this work needed to be redone, only because Apple does not provide an IPL option that says "Include photos from iTunes sync". (I'm sure, Steve Jobs would roll over in his grave and shout out "this is all crap!")
4. Once I have managed to set up IPL on both iOS devices and syncing works fine, the syncing may again stall for hours or even days for no apparent reason. All talk about "plug your device to a power supply, make sure that WIFI is strong enough, be patient" is nonsense. Sometimes it helps to enter the Photo app on all iOS devices and click around to force syncing, sometimes a reboot is required. If that does not help Apple Support asks you to log off/on to iCloud to force the device to re-sync. The effect of this measure is that all photos would be removed from the iOS device to be downloaded again from iCloud after logging in. But that also means that the changes on the iOS device are lost! (Another roll over for Steve Jobs...)
My conclusion: If you have plenty of time and a small photo library it is worth to play around with IPL, but if you want a professional and reliable service, wait until you find no more complaints about IPL in the iOS forums.
