Moving photos library file to another drive - why is it re-uploading??

[1brajesh]

Hi,

A question.

I have a 300Gig photo library that I want to move to another drive.
iCloud is enabled for this library and so are shared albums, so all these photos are also in iCloud.

So, I copied the library over to the other drive.
I opened the photos app holding down the option key, then selected the copied library in the new location.
Then I went to preferences and made this library the system library.
I also had to reenable iCloud and photos sharing.

Now, its re-uploading all my photos up to the cloud!
I can see this message when I go to the bottom of the screen showing all my photos.
"Uploading 72400 photos!"

This doesn't make sense. This may take forever because I don't really have fast upload speed.
Doesn't it know they are already there from the previous library?

I also cannot see my shared albums (they show up as icons but grey boxes underneath).

Wondering if anyone has experienced this?
This seems really stupid of Apple, to re-upload everything when its already there??

 

[chabig]

How can it know they are already there? I guess I'm not surprised that it views the new library as "new" and wants to replace your online photos. It might actually compare photos, and you might find yourself surprised that letting it just run won't take as long as you think.

Another way to have done this would have been to log Photos out of iCloud, create a new system library, and then log into iCloud. At least that way, Photos would have downloaded 300GB of data, which is probably faster than your upload speed.

Anyway, I hope it all works out.

 

[1brajesh]

How can it know they are already there? I guess I'm not surprised that it views the new library as "new" and wants to replace your online photos. It might actually compare photos, and you might find yourself surprised that letting it just run won't take as long as you think.

Another way to have done this would have been to log Photos out of iCloud, create a new system library, and then log into iCloud. At least that way, Photos would have downloaded 300GB of data, which is probably faster than your upload speed.

Anyway, I hope it all works out.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to be smart enough to compare photos.
Next time if I do this (hopefully never), I'll just let it download instead like you suggested.

 

[1brajesh]

Update.

I ran the activity monitor utility and looks like there is no significant uplink traffic, just a few bytes here and there, and the photo count is still decrementing. So it seems that there is some kind of comparison going on between the iCloud and what's on my drive.

Maybe its more thorough that I imagined.

They shouldn't use the word "uploading" on the status update...but seems the process has been thought through.

 

[1brajesh]

Just wanted to close off this thread, the whole process worked, it took about 3 days, I had to reboot the computer before the shared folders appeared. Not fun, but it does work.

 

[subaiku]

Just wanted to close off this thread, the whole process worked, it took about 3 days, I had to reboot the computer before the shared folders appeared. Not fun, but it does work.

Hi, just wanted to clarify with you, so iCloud didn't really re-upload all your photos again? It just did a comparison?
Am in a similar situation except the library on my Macbook is an older one and has less photos than on iCloud so am afraid it might 'override' the library on iCloud an delete them.