Q: iCloud photo library taking forever to upload photos - is this normal?!

EvilPuppetMaster wrote:

 

That should have read 150kB/s, as in kilobytes,

Nope, KB is kilobytes, MB is megabytes, Kb is kilobits and Mb is megabits. the case matters.

I have no idea what or even if kB means anything at all.

I discovered another thing that might be relevant. I was seeing iCloud network activity while my computer was awake, but if I left my computer sleeping overnight, I noticed iCloud backup hadn't gotten any further in the morning. I discovered there is a thing called 'Power Nap' under System Preferences > Energy Saver, which on my machine was disabled (presumably this is the default, as I never knew it existed), which appears to control whether your Mac will do things like sync with iCloud while it is sleeping. Once I enabled power nap, the iCloud sync would continue even when the computer was sleeping. I think this may in fact be the root cause for most people seeing this problem.

Thank you EvilPuppetMaster, excellent suggestions. Sorry Csound1: 1000 bytes or 1 kilobyte is kB not KB - go check out your SI units http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix. Actually, what you are referring to is the common usage for the binary representation of 1024 bytes which is typically referred to as 1 KB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte. However, all this maths this is not getting to the guts of the problem originally raised by Jam£s. Why does Photos take so long to upload on iCloud? This certainly has its mathematical component (I think we all know that Csound1), but what I understand that people are asking here is that, given our usual daily experiences of uploading/downloading on the internet, we sense that this is somehow much slower than usual and want to know if there is something else that has been overlooked (such as the Power Nap tip which is exactly the type of suggestion which I for one am looking for and which I am now in the process of testing - thank you again EPM! Why is this not pointed out more clearly somewhere?!), or else, whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Photos or iCloud? (Shock/horror! Why is it always the user's problem?!) Before I simply sit back and wait for the bytes to flow and the months to pass, I would be really interested in hearing from someone else out there (beyond the purely concrete sequential mathematical reasoning) who might have some new insights to give about this problem and suggest a new setting, approach or setup which may need tweaking to speed things up. Yours patiently St60+ P.S. Why don't we hear from some of the Apple/iCloud/Photos production people here especially given some of the serious problems users are finding with the new Photos app? Bring back iPhotos!

Yeah I think we can say with a fair degree of certainty that iCloud photo upload is buggy. It's not simply down to people having large libraries or poor upload connections. I started off with about 15000 photos/videos to upload, which was a few days before I first posted to this thread on April 21. It's now May 27, about 5 weeks, and I've only gotten through about 2500 of them, with 12500 remaining. All this while I have been keeping activity monitor open, which has remained fairly constant uploading about 150 kilobytes/sec (don't feed the trolls!), and I know that it is continuing while power napping, since after waking it from sleep you can still see the recent upload history in activity monitor. Over this time cloudd and nsurlsessiond have uploaded more than 50GB between them. My entire library is about 80GB. I am not doing anything else on this machine at all to account for additional upload bandwidth. By my reckoning, and I'm sure csound will back me up, I should have gotten through 80GB in about 10 days at a constant upload speed of 150KB (kilobytes) per second. Also the 50GB that it has uploaded in total in no way corresponds with the count of photos it claims to have uploaded. I suspect that it is either uploading the same photos over and over, or that it is partially uploading them, but failing frequently and having to restart. There is no other explanation for it using up so much bandwidth and getting no where.

Incidentally, you can keep tabs on the specific files it is currently loading by opening a terminal window and typing:

lsof -c cloudd | grep filecache

Apple, please fix this! You're product ***** and I'm on the verge of returning this iMac.

Woah. In case anyone thought I got all profane just then I should point out the word apple chose to *** out was simply 's u c k s'!

Mac (21.5-inch, Late 2013) Photos Ver 1.3

1.1 TB Fusion Drive

Download Speed 21.00 Mbps Upload speed 0.79 Mbps

Cable Company Internet

6,229 Photos and Videos 

5.553 Photos and Videos Uploaded to iCloud after 3 or 4 Days.

I got Apple Support to call me after 3 or 4 days of dealing with this. I dowloaded a file. They took over my computer, got me to start up computer holding, cmd/option/P/R keys, press power button, checked iCloud settings, then checked iCloud, compared number of photos on IMAC to iCloud. All they could offer was, thats allot of photos.

Thanks Danielle at Apple.

They were more concerned with what I was doing than what was going on at there end. Once these photos have finished uploading, I'll be cancelling my extra storage, and looking for alternatives. No solution was suggested or offered.

I agree Gerry, this is a total waste of time, Apple have got this Photos v1.3 so wrong!!!.

It seems to be ALL or NOTHING, you cannot even select what you wish other devices to sync up too for viewing offline. Why would i want my 120GB Mac Air to sync 66GB of my library, even with optimisation, its pathetic, I just want that laptop to sync the past 6 months or certain albums, or maybe the past years photos..... CERTAINLY not all of them 66GB..... thats why they are in the icloud to be centralised when I want them.

I'd like to be able to use this service (having paid the additional fees for a 200GB cloud storage at £2.49 per month) but I cant, its unrealiable, takes too long (DAYS to sync) even on a 40Mbps down/10Mbps Up line.... it randomly stops, several times i've had to log out/in of iCloud just to get it to resync and restart on the desktop and iPhone and iPad and Laptop. There is no way of knowing what this service is doing without 3rd party network monitors or CLI, no feedback whatsoever, just states Uploading XXX items. Useless

I have 66GB library of photos (10,000+) that range over the past 10 years from using iPhotos v1. even that allowed you to create Archive CD/DVDs backups and keep a list of what was on the disc should you need to refer back to it later.

I too am now turning off Photos and the storage from Apple as I run my own Amazon VPC and will look at an Amazon S3 storage solution.

Apple iMac

Apple MBP Laptop

Mac BookAir

iPhone 5s

iPad 3

Apple TV2

This is why i looked at the Apple iCloud as a solution to sync all my devices but not any more.

Can you help me determine how long to upload my photos also? :-) 109GB at 12.73Mbps?

Also - I started this upload by mistake and have learned that I need to continue upload and then turn off ... Is this correct? I did check download originals to this Mac under the iCloud Photo Library Option in Preferences.  Am I correct in my thinking?

I really want to own my pics vs storing them in the cloud for all my devices to use.

iCloud does the same as well.. They simply can go to **** of all the useless work the do.. Product Quality is diminising by the day. They got rid of the smart ones and employed the dumb ones. Just one photo to get uploaded takes ages and when you sitting down on the run assuming everything will be in seconds but gues not. Not even in the new Photo app where it shows the pending activities or at least an improvement in their iCloud page. The iCloud page has simply been forgotten and is becoming useless.

Now I have a headache .. Sorry for the burst of anger but it's no longer in the friendly side anymore.

Cheers