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User profile for user: inAjet
inAjet Author
User level: Level 1
43 points

Enabling iCloud Photos While People Album Scanning Photos

Hello All,


I'm about to take the plunge and enable iCloud Photos for the very first time on my 84000 photo- and 2000 video-strong library. I've been reluctant over the years, but to me the pros now seem to outweigh the cons.


The problem is, I recently moved my library to a new external drive and the People album is only about halfway through the scanning process.


My question to you is: is it fine to enable iCloud Photos while the People album scanning process is taking place, or is it advisable to first allow it to finish?


Any other tips for an iCloud Photos newbie? My plan is to have all originals downloaded to the library that currently resides on my external drive connected to my Mac, and have optimize storage enabled on my iPhone (as the entire library will not fit).


Cheers,


Chris

MacBook Pro 13”, macOS 10.15

Posted on Sep 9, 2020 5:08 PM

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User profile for user: léonie
léonie
User level: Level 10
194,871 points

Posted on Sep 9, 2020 5:18 PM

The scanning will continue, even if you enable iCloud Photos. The faces scan will be slower, if you are having an optimised library on your Mac, but as you want to keep the originals downloaded from iCloud, it should make no difference.


I would first enable it on the iPhone, wait until the iPhone phots are in iCloud, and only then on the Mac. I had it twice happen, that the albums and smart albums vanished from my Mac's Photos Library, when I enabled iCloud Photos on my iPhone or iPad after the Mac has already been syncing with iCloud. I don't know, if the problem still persists, but it appears to be safer to get the iOS devices started to sync with iCloud, and then the Mac, after the iOS devices are already in sync with iCloud.


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User profile for user: léonie
léonie
User level: Level 10
194,871 points

Sep 9, 2020 5:18 PM in response to inAjet

The scanning will continue, even if you enable iCloud Photos. The faces scan will be slower, if you are having an optimised library on your Mac, but as you want to keep the originals downloaded from iCloud, it should make no difference.


I would first enable it on the iPhone, wait until the iPhone phots are in iCloud, and only then on the Mac. I had it twice happen, that the albums and smart albums vanished from my Mac's Photos Library, when I enabled iCloud Photos on my iPhone or iPad after the Mac has already been syncing with iCloud. I don't know, if the problem still persists, but it appears to be safer to get the iOS devices started to sync with iCloud, and then the Mac, after the iOS devices are already in sync with iCloud.


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User profile for user: inAjet
inAjet Author
User level: Level 1
43 points

Sep 9, 2020 5:32 PM in response to léonie

Thanks for the prompt response and helpful tip! Despite the two errors you refer to, would you still recommend taking advantage of iCloud Photos? Up until now, I had just been periodically importing all iPhone photos to macOS Photos with the lightning cable, and then syncing the last year's worth of photos and a few albums back to the iPhone with iTunes and then, starting in Catalina, Finder. This was working great, until Catalina broke the sync functionality. If Apple's unofficial motivation was to frustrate users into using iCloud Photos, they may have won this round. But I digress.....

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Enabling iCloud Photos While People Album Scanning Photos

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