Syncing Photos to iCloud stuck?

My reason not to believe it's the servers is that when I did the rebuild it uploaded 42 gigs in about 8 hours. Before that it didn't basically do anything. I would recommend you to check network activity from activity monitor and see if anything is truly uploaded. In my case there was no traffic from Photos or cloudd daemo.

However, I am seeing data uploading on the activity monitor. usually 80-100 kbps. And (SLOW) progress is being made. But my ISP says that I should be getting about 900 kbps upload speed. And the tech I spoke with thought I am only getting 2/3 of that, but I think I'm seeing 1/9 of it. Someone's coming out tomorrow to look into why the uplink is slow, but there is still a missing bottleneck. Either Apple's servers or the app itself are possible culprits, I suppose.

I am starting to see veery slow progress. Maybe enough ppl have given up leaving the few left with some capacity to use.

The library was, i old iphoto, 220GB but I think I on top of that now have an additional 100gig by moving to the new Photos.

Given that some syncing has started, from some devices rebuilding things sounds scary 🙂

Any more info on that topic, what it entails etc?

What to me it looked like rebuild did -> Build library in HD then starts to sync to cloud -> if it can match the rebuild library photo to one in cloud it won't transfer it again. If not, it will send it again (I think videos will be send again).

Since my latest reboot it seems to be uploading again. although slow.

When active it seems to in the region of 1MB per second which roughly equates to 10mbit. I fraction of what I have available but at least something.

200GB would take 62 hours at that speed. Somehow I think it will take longer, often the speed I see is much lower than 1MB/sec.

buying 500GB icloud storage was done in a heartbeat. Making use of the size seems to take a tad bit longer sadly.

So far rebooting has been my remedy for when it goes to a complete stop for a prolonged period of time.

The time it took to transfer the 40GB previously mentioned in this thread would take 12 hours with 1MB/s which seems accurate with what was experienced in that post. Maybe a deliberate max-throttle value from apple. Either due to capacity issues, or to ensure that your bandwidth is not fully allocated. Could even be that it tests connection speed and use a percentage of it.

I half believe you might be right about deliberate throttling. If so, it's a poor choice on Apple's part, I think. Like cutting the dog's tail off an inch at a time.

Also, it doesn't explain why (in my case) a 100 kbps upload should destroy my usual 10-11 Mbps download speed, cutting it to about 0.5 Mbps. I could see why it would reduce it by 100 kbps, not why it cuts it by a factor of 20.

That is a question for my ISP's tech guy who is coming today to check out my slow upload speeds.I'm supposed to be getting 20/1 Mbps upload/download, and I am getting about half that, quite aside from any shenanigans from Apple messing with the speed.

actually, it occurs to me that if Apple is throttling photo upload speeds, it's more about protecting their servers than about not taking up my bandwidth.

My ISP's tech guy was here today, and he diagnosed a bad line to the jack I was using for my modem. I ran a new cable, and now my speeds up and down are more in line with advertised values. And I'm now getting 30-40% higher upload speed from the iCloud Photos sync, which is 130-140 kbps rather than the 100 kbps or less I was seeing before.

So I have to say that for some reason, Photos is throttling the speed so a fraction of what I should be able to see. Perhaps to prevent Apple's servers from bogging down. I think Apple needs to come clean on this eventually.

David Rinnan wrote:

when I check system preferences / iCloud: I can see that Photos has managed, in a couple of days, to take up 35GB of space 🙂

I have 100mbit fibre, a fixed connection from my imac27" to my network.

Very nice, but what is your Internet upload speed?

Divide 1TB by whatever your upload speed (remember to use the same quantity units) is and you will know how long it should take (best case)

Or just measure your upload speed at www.speedof.me and post it here, I'll do the math for you.

I have 300mps at home where I have the 27" imac. 100mbps at the office with the macbook.

upload download same speed here. If anything the upload speed is higher since less ppl upload than download.

today, Photos has sent 45GB which must be considered good considering how it was in the beginning. Looks like apple has gotten their stuff together now. Just wished they could provide some more bandwidth. Seems silly to pay good dollars for 500GB and not being able to utilize it properly. But I guess that apple will try to increase capacity as more people use it.

Take a speed test here: and post a screenshot of the test results.

This was my result from home network https://www.dropbox.com/s/dw7gdgfvckw29lo/photo%2018.4.2015%208.41.05.png?dl=0

home broadband 300mbit fibre