iCloud for Windows still a buggy mess
Like a lot of people with a Windows desktop I was fairly excited to find Apple / Windows have finally integrated iCloud into the Windows app... that is where my excitement ends. This integration is, and I imagine always will be essentially unusable. The problem is Apple don't care, and I can sum up fairly easily how little they care, when I rang for support with a few issues, the person I spoke to on the phone was shocked to learn that Windows has iCloud integration...
I'll start with the minor things.
1) If you delete a photo from iCloud in Windows photos, about 50% of the time the photo doesn't actually delete from iCloud, it does however show in recently deleted, I.E. the photo is both in recently deleted and the photo library.
2) If you recover a photo from recently deleted on iCloud it will NEVER sync to iCloud on Windows photos.
3) When saving a shared photo on an iPhone, for example, it's a 50/50 whether this syncs down to iCloud for Windows.
Now the above can somewhat be worked around, 1) only use iCloud to manage photos, 2) and 3) download by hand any images that you recover or save. The below issues though are much more nefarious and are what, for me, make the app essentially unusable.
Now the more major issue.
4) Probably the worst one, it is basically impossible to store iCloud photos locally. You can right click the iCloud Photos file in Windows and click Always Keep on this Device, however it gets about 50 photos in before deciding it has had enough and gets stuck syncing. This means there is basically no way to download and therefore backup your pictures as all that are stored locally are thumbnails.
5) In trouble shooting this I also found this hilarious sketchy issue. I deleted around 8,000 pictures from iCloud and after doing this I had to delete iCloud from my PC and resync it (about five times now). Every time I resync my iCloud onto PC it pulls down all of the pictures that I've deleted from iCloud...
The last point I'll make is just a point of UI, well... there isn't one. All you can get out of iCloud for windows is how many items are syncing. Unlike OneDrive there is no way to see what is syncing and whether it is progressing, this makes troubleshooting, or even understanding if something is happening impossible. When compared with the UI for, well frankly any cloud service, but we'll use OneDrive as an example, iCloud is atrocious. "11,765 items pending" useful... "4,653 items downloading"... riveting stuff, especially when the app has been saying that for the past twelve hours... guess I'll just resync my entire library... again.
Yes, I have done basic troubleshooting, I have resynced, I have reinstalled, I have the latest version, this app is buggy. Please, just fix the app and update the UI so we can actually see what is going on in the background.
Windows, Windows 10