icloud photo library (beta) stuck uploading

azsharom wrote:

1. I never saw them on iCloud - just could not get through (I'm preparing myself for the fact that I may have lost everything).

2. Yes, iCloud Photos (Beta) is turned on on my iPhone 6 Plus - on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off.... trying to shock it into action as some have suggested... nada.

3. 10.3.3 is already out and available? Software Update tells me '...computer says Noooooo'.

Cheers.

Have you never downloaded your photos to iPhoto? You should not just leave photos on a phone or camera.

Here's what's going on for me. iCloud Photos was working fine from day one. Every photo I take shows in in iCloud, and will download to iPhoto from the cloud, or when I plug the phone in.

Here's where my problem started; I was having an issue with my iPhone 5 (and I don't even recall what that was at the moment), so I decided to reset it, and then restore from my backup. What I didn't realize is that restoring from a backup does not copy your photos back to the phone.

So, many, but not all, of my photos appear to be on the phone, but aren't. Normally they would download to the phone when you open them (I had it set to have the optimized versions on the phone), but now that doesn't happen.

However, some of the photos have indeed downloaded from the cloud to the phone. It's kind of random.

Since my first post, when I go to Settings -> iCloud -> Photos, it says "Uploading 1,178 Items." This is up from last time. I know the photos are on iCloud, and they download to iPhoto. So nothing is lost, I just can't get them back on my phone.

And the only reason I need some on my phone is if I'm posting them on FaceBook, etc.

What I have been doing is, I also have them getting backed up to DropBox and OneDrive from the phone. So when there's a photo which will not load, I delete it from the phone and copy it back on from DropBox.

Regarding some of the fixes; I cannot turn off iCloud Photos. It just doesn't let me do it. I might be getting an error message, I don't recall, but either way I can't turn it off.

Apple says you can copy photos back on the phone using AirDrop, but that doesn't work between my iPhone and older 2009 iMac. But my photos are getting backed up to iCloud, I just can't get the older ones back on my phone via iCloud.

Let's hope iCloud Photos is out of beta, and fixed soon.

Yup - really hoping that once it goes out of Beta that all my ills will be solved.

I upload photos from my iPhone to my NAS so they're 'safe' there.

I've tried turning icloud photos etc off on all my apple devices and restarted but to no avail.

I must be the one out of the many millions of Apple users who just is *&$% out of luck.

So annoyed because generally Apple just works - and in all other areas I use them for, it does.

#fingerscrossed

I think a lot of problems being experienced are with regards to the absolute overload of the Apple Servers with the implementation of iCloud Photos. I tried out the service and it's simply not for me for the following reasons:

1. The good. It allows for full backup of your entire library, which is a good thing for folks who don't take the time to back up their hard drives any other way. The ability to view all pictures on all platforms, the ability to edit and have it "pushed" to all your devices, but there is a caveat and it comes at price which needs to be measured carefully.

2. The bad. Large photo libraries will take a long, long, long time to upload, If you have a lot of pictures in your camera rolls, even longer. I ended up having to download my entire camera roll via Image Capture so that the process would continue. If you have a slow upload speed through your ISP, be prepared to wait a long time as well. I uploaded a library of over 35,000 pictures.

3. The ugly. Zero privacy and control over what you upload. Your entire library, all your albums get uploaded, as well as all your pictures. This mean that if you have pictures/albums that you would prefer not to have in iCloud, you need to move them to another space. This is self defeating in having Photos as your central repository for all your pictures. Gone is the ability to control which albums you want to sync across all devices and which you want to remain private. We'll see if Apple changes this is the future releases, but I don't think so. The fact that you have to refresh each album that downloads to your device manually in order to view the contents. Again, if you have a large library with a lot of albums, be prepared to take a lot of time doing this. You have to keep the album open, and constantly scroll through it for pics to download (my experience), it does not refresh automatically. The fact that all your pictures are pushed to your devices has created havoc with my iPad (128GB) and my Iphone 6 Plus (64gb). Both devices now show 100% occupied space, with pictures taking up almost 99% of the space. Not what I was expecting. Although the usage on the actual device shows less, iTunes appears not to be taking to Photos to sync this correctly. This resulted in having to turn off the iCloud switch, and restore the iPad from scratch, as I cannot eliminate the space which was taken up originally by the iCloud Library. Again, my take on the experience, but the hype, and the solution, is not for everyone.

That said, I have begun to experience problems syncing iCloud documents between iPad, Iphone and Mac. I was on the phone with the Tech last night doing some trouble shooting, and the syncing times are incredibly slow.

There are server errors on iCloud whenever you attempt to delete pictures from www.cloud.com.

All these issues lead to very poor implementation of this new feature, but if you ask me, the hype is not worth in in the end.

When turning off the iCloud Photos service, it wreaked havoc on both my iPhone and iPad, leaving orphaned files behind which failed to clear out. Memory on both devices was over the capacity.

Again, this might work for people with very small collections and no albums, but when you start to think of iTunes and Photos a your "one stop shop" for all things pictures, it simply doesn't work. There is too much exposure of your "private" pics which you may not want on line, or on your phone, but are pushed to all devices regardless.

Patrickp wrote:

3. The ugly. Zero privacy and control over what you upload. Your entire library, all your albums get uploaded, as well as all your pictures.

...

iTunes appears not to be taking to Photos to sync this correctly.

Zero privacy? You are using two-step verification, right?

And the point of backing up your photos to iCloud is why you don't choose what to backup. The same is true for using DropBox and OneDrive to back up photos. It just backs up any new photos there are.

iTunes no longer syncs photos when you are using iCloud Photo. iPhoto syncs photos, at least downloading them to your Mac. Photo Stream still works too. Only Photo Stream doesn't synch every photo. It was the last 1000 photos, and they only stay on the server for 30 days.

That part has been working flawlessly.

I suggest you read up on how this works.

David:

I am fully read up and fully experienced on iCloud Photos'. I've used. it, but thanks for the "suggestion".

He's what you misunderstood. Once you flip the switch on iCloud Photos Beta, you do NOT get to select which pictures and albums go up to the cloud and then pushed to your devices. Thus my comment on "zero privacy".

All your albums, stored in Photos (or iPhotos) are automatically pushed to iCloud and back to devices.

Once you get it working (if you have not already) you will experience these things. The takeaway here is that Photos no longer can be the "repository" for all pictures and albums, IF IN FACT you want to keep them from syncing to iCloud and to your devices.

I tried the suggestion to open iPhoto on my Mac and BAM - pics started showing up. Strange...

Hi,

I had this exactly. My iPhone and iPad got stuck just moments after I enabled Icloud Photo Library.

I then plugged my ipad overnight to a charger and in the morning, it was all synced 🙂

So I plugged my iphone and it immediately started syncing the rest.

Hope it helps someone

Same issue here. I have a Mid-2011 MBA running the 10.10.3 public beta of Yosemite. I turned on iCloud Photo Library in the Photos app and it proceeded to upload my pics/videos. It took a few days because the upload process would bring my wi-fi to a crawl which was a problem when trying to watch Netflix. So I paused it and only let it run overnight. Eventually all 10K+ photos/videos uploaded and the process "completed". That's when things got interesting. I say "completed" in air quotes because while I can see 43+ GB of space being used for Photos & Videos in my iCloud storage ... I can't see the actual pictures on iCloud.com. When I try to open the Photos app on iCloud.com I was met with the infamous "Preparing your library" message. It's been like that for days even with leaving my laptop running overnight. So then just for sh*ts and giggles I decided to turn on iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone 6. Well it's been stuck saying "Uploading 224 items" for hours now. At first there was a progress bar but that's disappeared. I certainly don't see anything in the Photos app on my iPhone other than the 224 photos that were on the Camera Roll. It simply is not "seeing" the entire iCloud Photo Library even though it's turned on.

I've rebooted, quit apps, turned iCloud Photo Library on and off, etc. Nothing is working. And like others have said ... that is so not cool when I had to pay for 200 GB of iCloud storage just to ATTEMPT to use this service.😠

This is *exactly* what I've been going through, down to the level of frustration of paying for 200GB storage to make use of a non-functioning service.

I've also got 10.10.3 running on a secondary MBP and like Ondray, it's not yielding results.

I dearly hope the final release will fix things...

It would appear that things have improved for me but there is still a ways to go. A few minutes after I made my post above the Photos app on my iPhone started to sync. I didn't do anything so perhaps it just realized I was publicly disparaging it and it decided to get its act together. Those 224 photos started to upload. And then things really got weird. The Photos app crashed. When I restarted it the app said it was now "Downloading X photos". Huh? That would complete and it would then say it was "Uploading X photos". Crash! ***? This continued for several hours but eventually all the photos uploaded from my iPhone, synced up with what was already in iCloud Photo Library from my laptop, and then it downloaded all the "optimized" versions of the photos and videos back down to my iPhone. So now my photo library that I see on my Mac matches what I see on my iPhone. For the most part that is. My Mac reports 9891 photos and 200 videos ... whereas my iPhone reports 9877 photos and 184 videos. So my iPhone is short 14 photos and 16 videos. Naturally I have no clue which ones are missing or why. But I'm not going to worry about it for now. The good news is that other than that iCloud Photo Library seems to be functioning as expected. If a make a change on my Mac it is reflected on my iPhone within seconds. And vice versa. Unfortunately, the Photos app on iCloud.com is still stuck saying "Preparing your library". I do wish there was a mechanism to manually sync the Photos app on the Mac and the iPhone with the iCloud Photo Library. I understand that Apple wants to make it "just work" in the background ... but sometimes that doesn't happen so there needs to be a way to invoke the process yourself. In any event, I now have 2 out of 3 elements of the iCloud Photo Library experience that are functional. So the money I'm spending on the iCloud storage is no longer going to waste. I have no idea how to get the third element on iCloud.com working. We shall see what the future holds.

Success!

So I just updated to iOS 8.2, and nothing much had changed. Photos were uploading slowly, and some of the ones that were not downloading back to the phone had downloaded.

So today I decided to turn off iCloudPhotos, and see what happened. In the past I just got an error. Now when I told it to download the photos to my phone it told me I didn't have enough space. So I chose to delete them. It said they were still in the cloud.

After doing that it said there were 1,700 some photos uploading. Now about an hour later they are all done!

And when I select a photo, it downloads to the phone.

I'm curios, as I tried this and reverted back to the iTunes syncing, how many GB did your pics consume before, and how many GB do they consume (on your Idevices), now that your entire library has been pushed? Also, Did all your pictures end up in your camera roll as well?

How many GB did your entire library consume on your devices when you plug into iTunes? Does your camera roll now show all 1700 pictures which were uploaded

cpsadowski wrote:

How many GB did your entire library consume on your devices when you plug into iTunes? Does your camera roll now show all 1700 pictures which were uploaded

Right now I have 3,375 photos on my 32GB iPhone 5. iTunes states I have 3.53GB of photos on my phone. I have 2.9GB free.

iCloud says I have 3,373 photos. Not sure what the other two are. It shows 2.79GB worth of photos.

I'm not sure why it said I didn't have enough space initially, but everything seems to be up to date. I see a photo I just saved a few minutes ago.

My iCloud Photo Library is 47.1 GB. But my Photos app on my iPhone is 5.9 GB due to the "Optimize iPhone Storage" setting being turned on.