iPhone optimized iCloud photos won't download

[FraggadeliX]

My wife's iPhone 5S had 'optimize iPhone storage' on in iCloud prefs. An increasing number of photo's started to appear in low resolution, and when tapped all seemed to freeze halfway through the download, getting stuck round 50%, even though there was still well over 2 GB of free space.

I've tried to set it to 'download and keep originals', but that didn't do anything.

I've tried some suggestions from other forums and have thrown away all but the most recent photos and now I want to put the photos back from iCloud, however, there doesn't seem to be a way to get your photo's from iCloud to your iPhone. (they're still in the cloud, i've checked)

Does anyone have a suggestion for getting the photo's back and making sure the optimized photo's don't freeze up again?

Thanks, Evert

 

[richwoodrocket]

I have the same problem.... It's extremely annoying.

 

[cynics]

Have you tried on a quality wifi connection?

I have this problem on occasion too. It's usually just a poor connection. It is annoying because when I want to look at a photo but it's not working trying to find a better internet connection isn't an option.

Right now it's working very well.

 

[FraggadeliX]

It's not the connection. Everything else, including my own iPhone, is working perfectly. It really seemed an issue with retrieving photos from iCloud.

HOWEVER: The problem seems to be fixed, though I took some rigorous steps:

I've checked icloud.com. It had all 2000+ photo's there, in the right quality. (Just to be sure I've downloaded all of them to my PC's HDD and then made another backup from there to a separate HDD, but that was really more for my own piece of mind.)

I had the iPhone make a full backup of all it's content to iCloud. Then I went to 'Erase All Content and Settings', (prayed to Steve) and reset the whole damn thing to factory settings. After the iPhone restarted, I simply restored from iCloud and waited for everything to reload.

(Actually there was one major caveat: as a security measure Apple sends you an activation code via SMS, a major problem of course as the iPhone is in limbo at that point. I had to put her SIM in my iPhone and tell her iPhone to resend the activation code. After that everything went smoothly.)

Now her photo library is in perfect sync again with iCloud, all 2000+ of them. It gave me a quick scare by initially telling me there were zero photo's, but that corrected after about 2 secs. Now the low res proxies load in half a second.

LONG STORY SHORT: Backup to iCloud > Erase and Reset > Restore from iCloud
A little nerve wracking, but it worked for me.

ADDED BONUS: the erase and reset seems to have freed up another whopping 4 GB of storage, so it now totals over 6GB of free space. (but as i'm typing this I realize that that is maybe optimized iCloud storage as the total of those 2000+ photo's was about 4GB)