iCloud Photos is a huge disappointment to me – is it worth continuing?

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Level 1

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iCloud Photos is a huge disappointment to me – is it worth continuing?

Last November I decided to start paying for 200Gb of storage in iCloud Photos. I wanted what it says on the tin... all of my photos on all of my devices. That's an iMac running Catalina, a MacBook Pro running High Sierra and an iPhone SE. I am much less concerned about the phone because I don't like working on a small screen. I mainly wanted to be able to edit and organise my 39,000 images on both of the computers.

I gave iCloud Photos a tough task because the two albums on the iMac and laptop were effectively the same one, with four months of more recent additions on the iMac. But everything I had read said that iCloud Photos would sort this out and get rid of any full duplicates.

First, I could not believe how slow it was to upload. Around six continuous weeks at the first attempt before the All Photos view on both machines showed that they had finally finished. Then I found that on the MacBook around 1,700 pictures had failed to upload and on the iMac around 600. All of my images are original JPEGs from a compact camera or from my iPhone so I have no idea why this should be.

The only solution I have seen online is to export the originals and re-import them. I am never, ever going to do this for so many images because all have been edited, cropped and those from the camera (around three-quarters of the total) have been manually GPS-tagged within Apple Photos.

So after a bit of research on these forums I disconnected from iCloud on the laptop, signed in again and watched as the upload process began again. Within a few days, when only about 2,000 pictures had uploaded, there were already 600 in the "Unable to Upload" folder. So as the next attempted "fix" I repaired the Photos library on the MacBook, which started the upload process yet again. Similar result. With 3,300 pictures uploaded there are already 700 in "Unable to Upload".

Having not looked at Photos on the iMac for a while, I then saw that nearly all of my albums (many hundreds of them, going back to those created in iPhoto in the early 2000s) have been duplicated and in each case the duplicate has fewer images than what I presume is the original. Will this ever resolve itself?

In the meantime, I note that edits I made to pictures and albums on the MacBook a week ago have still not been reflected on the iMac. Will that ever happen?

I am now thoroughly fed up with iCloud Photos and am minded to wait until the new upload has finished, end my subscription, and accept that I will only be able to edit and organise my photos on the newer iMac. Either that or switch to Mylio, but it's a rather expensive subscription for what it is.

Does anyone have similar dismal experiences with iCloud Photos but found it came good in the end?

MacBook Pro 17″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Jan 12, 2021 2:25 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

197,237 points

Jan 12, 2021 3:21 AM in response to Night Ed

It is a tough task, if the libraries on both Macs are nearly identical. You may get duplicate albums by the iCloud syncing, if you are having albums with identical names on both Macs, but in different folders or with different photos in them. Then the merged library may be showing both albums, so you can decide, which version to keep.

Repairing a library is a very expensive operation, if the library is syncing with iCloud. The upload will have to be repeated to merge the repaired library again into the iCloud Photos Library. You will have to wait for the new upload to finish, before any of the edited photos from the other devices will sync back from iCloud to the device, that is still uploading.

As to the photos that are "Unable to upload" - have these photos been edited in an external editor? Then the photos may be using a color sync profile, that is not compatible with iCloud. Then only exporting with a compatible color sync profile and reimporting will help. The same will happen, if you have used adjustments on the photo, that are not compatible with the current version of iCloud Photos.

I understand, that you do not want to export and reimport because of the editing work you invested. Usually the adjustments you applied and the locations you assigned will be included, if you export the edited versions photos as JPEGs at the full resolution:

Select all photos "Unable to upload", with ⌘A, then go to File > Export > Export ... Photos".
In the export dialog click "^" to the right of "Photo Kind: JPEG", then set the size to "Full Size" and the quality to "High" or "Best").
Enable the checkmarks for "Title"; "Keywords", "Captions", and "Locations". (The screenshot is from a newer system version, but should be similar to what you're seeing on Catalina).
Save the exported edited versions in a separate folder. Now export the original versions as well Witt "File > Export > Export unmodified Originals" and save these originals in a separate folder to archive them. I would enable the "IPTC as XMP" flag to create sidecar files with the metadata.

Now reimport one of the exported versions to see, if all your metadata are still there as expected.

Once you are satisfied, that you still have all metadata, reimport all edited versions in one go.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

197,237 points

Jan 12, 2021 5:06 AM in response to Night Ed

Night Ed wrote:

Thanks for the detailed reply, Léonie. I do appreciate it.

This is the first time I have heard it suggested that exporting and re-importing edited pictures may solve the "Unable to Upload" issue so I will wait until the repaired MacBook album is uploaded again then give it a try as you suggest.

The reimporting is the suggested solution in Apple's support document - it worked on most of my problematic photos with the help of the smart albums described in the document:

About the status bar in Photos for macOS - Apple Support

Are you seeing "Unable to upload" primarily on your Catalina Mac or the High Sierra Mac? I would first try to get the upload problem solved on the Catalina Mac, because Catalina has made some older image formats incompatible, that we still could use on High Sierra. There is one problem with the external editors. Even if the original is a JPEG, the files saved back to Photos from the external editors could be in any format TIFF or PSD), camouflaged as JPEG and can contain layers that Photos cannot handle This is why exporting and reimporting can help.

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Answer 3

Yer_Man

Level 10

163,728 points

Jan 12, 2021 4:02 AM in response to Night Ed

Mylio has excellent syncing capabilities, and doesn't even need to use the Cloud to do it. Another alternative is Adobe's Lightroom - the Cloud version not the Classic version. In the Lightroom application all your originals are actually stored in the cloud (of course it also creates back ups on your machines if you choose), so the Master library, as such, is "up there".

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Answer 4

Night Ed Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 12, 2021 4:19 AM in response to Night Ed

Thanks for the detailed reply, Léonie. I do appreciate it.

This is the first time I have heard it suggested that exporting and re-importing edited pictures may solve the "Unable to Upload" issue so I will wait until the repaired MacBook album is uploaded again then give it a try as you suggest.

In terms of external editors, about one in 1,000 pictures may have been edited in an old CS3 version of Photoshop if I needed to do a "head transplant" on a group shot. And maybe one in 200 have been created from multiple originals using the now-discontinued Autopano Giga app to join up panoramas.

But I don't actually see any of those images among those that have failed to upload. There's a mixture of pics from my Canon compact and my iPhone, with the phone perhaps over-represented – close to half of those which failed as opposed to around a quarter of the whole library.

Thanks for the suggestions, Terence. Both Mylio and Lightroom Cloud want around $100 a year or more for their services, which for the moment I'm reluctant to pay.

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