iCloud Is there anything I should know before upgrading to iCloud Photos? Will this break my workflow?

[KTK1990]

Hello,

With photostream being retired I am looking at upgrading a family member's iCloud storage tier and creating a family sharing group so I can use some of their storage. If I join the family group and turn on iCloud Photos on my phone and iPad, will this break my workflow?

I usually take a ton of photos, every few days I will back them up to my Mac using the image capture app. After I download the photos/videos and put them in the right folder and import them into the photos app I will delete them via the image capture app. Will I still be able to do this on my Mac and iPhone? Or is there a better way that won't break my workflow and allow me to temporarily backup my photos in case I break my phone while out. I'd ideally like to be able to view my photos on my iPad before I back them up and manually backup to my laptop then offload to an external hard drive for long term storage.

Thanks,

 

[Boomish69]

I honestly wouldn't bother, if you have an Amazon account it will sync all your photo's full resolution for free between your devices including desktop. Your phone & iPad can be synced over wifi with you Mac automatically, but you need to switch it on first by plugging them in & enabling sync when connected & sync over wifi.
I've around 45k photos & used to manually sync this way before iCloud but have been happily paying for it for past few years, however the recent price increase made me question why I'm paying for this storage when I have backups already on my Mac & Apple have increased the price massively it doesn't make sense to pay over & over each month for storing the same data. I am at the moment trying to remove all my photos from iCloud, even though I let my iPhone iPad & desktop download all pics for 48 hours it still says I am missing pics if I turn off iCloud, so I am downloading everything up there however Apple have made this insanely hard, first it is frustratingly slow, I'm now maxed out at 10MB/sec plus you can only download 1000 pic/videos at a time! Taking forever with 45000 pics!

I spoke to a photographer for advice & he said as long as you have a backup & an offsite backup there is no need for iCloud photo storage unless you find it convenient but he did say it's an expensive way to store mostly data that doesn't change apart from updates, especially when there are free options & the price of a cloud based hard drive/data storage server that you can stream from home would save you the cost within a year anyway. He has far too many photo's to store in iCloud photos even his own family ones, he said it's a good idea to break them into smaller collections as they will build to very large over your life time & finding specific photo's will get harder & the risk of loosing memories will be greater. every month he stores all his pics dragging & dropping into his custom storage DIR whilst saving a few select on his iPhone that is automatically synced to his Mac.
Having done iCloud now & seen how difficult it is to download my photo's from there I wouldn't advise it unless you really can't be bothered.

 

[KTK1990]

Thank you, I do and don't have Amazon prime. A family member has Prime and I just use their login when I need to buy anything (It goes to the same house anyways, just a different name on the label and card). I previously used Google Photos but stopped once they removed the free uploads. I could in theory upload everything to Amazon but it would take forever to upload 1.8TB of photos/videos on a 25Mbps upload speed.

I was going to setup family sharing with 3 people on the 200Gb plan (Seems more logical to do family sharing for 3 people instead of us 3 making our own accounts. This way I can also backup my phone and iPad to the cloud)

My plan was to continue using my manual backup method using image capture to transfer to my MacBook and delete after a few days from image capture once it has been transferred. Turning iCloud Photos on using my iPhone and iPad while keeping it off on my MacBook. This way I can wirelessly view photos on my iPad but not mess up my backup system on my laptop.

I figured if I have the space in iCloud I might as well have a temporary storage similar to how photostream worked. My biggest reason to use it is if I travel and my phone gets lost/stolen/damaged then in theory I wouldn't lose any photos if they are backed up in the cloud. I dont travel that much but when I do I don't bring my laptop so if the phone gets broken/stolen then any photos would be gone and the last backup would be from months ago. Plus I tend to visit theme parks often, I haven't had my phone fall out of my pocket yet but I have seen others lose their phones.

If I can use it like a photostream replacement the maximum length a photo would be in there would be for like 3 weeks. If it doesn't work or puts up a fight with image capture then I'll probably join the family sharing group and leave iCloud Photos off.