HT204264: iCloud Photo Library

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Q: iCloud photo library taking forever to upload photos - is this normal?!

Why is my iCloud photo library taking forever to upload photos? I have roughly 17,000 pics to upload - i have sufficient iCloud storage capacity - the message telling me how many photos it is uploading doesn't seem to be reducing and its been about 3 days so far... can anyone shed any light on this?!

Posted on Apr 17, 2015 9:22 AM

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Q: iCloud photo library taking forever to upload photos - is this normal?!

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  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 17, 2015 9:23 AM in response to Jam£s
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    Apr 17, 2015 9:23 AM in response to Jam£s

    Tell me how fast your upload speed is and the size of your library, I'll tell you how long it will take.

  • by Jam£s,

    Jam£s Jam£s Apr 17, 2015 9:28 AM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (2 points)
    Apr 17, 2015 9:28 AM in response to Csound1

    sorry how can i find out how fast my upload speed is? library is 89GB i have 200GB in iCloud.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 17, 2015 9:36 AM in response to Jam£s
    Level 9 (50,086 points)
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    Apr 17, 2015 9:36 AM in response to Jam£s

    Jam£s wrote:

     

    sorry how can i find out how fast my upload speed is? library is 89GB i have 200GB in iCloud.

    Then the question can not be answered until you do.

     

    Go to speedof.me and measure, then tell me what the upload speed is (not the download, which will be the higher of the 2 numbers)

  • by Jam£s,

    Jam£s Jam£s Apr 17, 2015 10:05 AM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (2 points)
    Apr 17, 2015 10:05 AM in response to Csound1

    upload is 140 kbps....

  • by KeithT1974,

    KeithT1974 KeithT1974 Apr 17, 2015 10:17 AM in response to Jam£s
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 17, 2015 10:17 AM in response to Jam£s

    I Have exactly the same problem and I do not believe it to be the network.

     

    I Download photos on the day of release and upgraded my iCloud account to cover the storage needed.

     

    A Couple thousands photos upload and then it all stopped. My Mac has been on and connected day and night but there is still more photos to upload.

     

    I Have paused the service and started again. Restarted photos. Restarted the Mac. Reset my network and none of this has kicked the upload into action.

     

    I Have a fast fibre broadband connection so I do not believe it to be my network either.

     

    Can someone confirm if there is an issue with the new service?

     

    I Wanted thjs to work to free up space as I am traveling in two days. Looks like that's not going to happen at this rate  

  • by Csound1,Helpful

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 17, 2015 10:26 AM in response to Jam£s
    Level 9 (50,086 points)
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    Apr 17, 2015 10:26 AM in response to Jam£s

    Jam£s wrote:

     

    upload is 140 kbps....

    Then be prepared for an extremely long wait.

     

    89GB at 140Kb/s will take 1,854 hours (77 days)

  • by Jam£s,

    Jam£s Jam£s Apr 17, 2015 10:36 AM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (2 points)
    Apr 17, 2015 10:36 AM in response to Csound1

    thank you.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 17, 2015 10:39 AM in response to KeithT1974
    Level 9 (50,086 points)
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    Apr 17, 2015 10:39 AM in response to KeithT1974

    KeithT1974 wrote:

     

    I Have exactly the same problem and I do not believe it to be the network.

     

    Then I will ask you the same question

     

    What is the size of your library and your upload speed, I'll tell you the minimum time it will take to upload.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 17, 2015 10:41 AM in response to Jam£s
    Level 9 (50,086 points)
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    Apr 17, 2015 10:41 AM in response to Jam£s

    Sorry it's not better

     

    You might want to call your ISP, that is an exceptionally slow speed.

  • by KeithT1974,

    KeithT1974 KeithT1974 Apr 17, 2015 11:17 AM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 17, 2015 11:17 AM in response to Csound1

    I have 3,957 items left to upload and am running at 4.35 Mbps

     

    And I have 181 GB of space available in iCloud and my Photos library is 29Gb although I do not know how much of that has already uploaded.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 17, 2015 11:35 AM in response to KeithT1974
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    Apr 17, 2015 11:35 AM in response to KeithT1974

    KeithT1974 wrote:

     

    I have 3,957 items left to upload and am running at 4.35 Mbps

    Which tells me half of what I need to know, how large (in GigaBytes) is your library (remaining to be uploaded)

     

    The total (29GB) library will need 19 hours (best case)

     

    FYI, 4.35 Mb/s is somewhat lower than the US average broadband (upload) speed, even if the marketing dept does call it 'Fast Fibre'

  • by EvilPuppetMaster,

    EvilPuppetMaster EvilPuppetMaster Apr 21, 2015 6:27 PM in response to Jam£s
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Apr 21, 2015 6:27 PM in response to Jam£s

    There is definitely more than simply slow upload speeds here. At the very least there is a bug in the progress indicator that appears in the iCloud settings pane in the photos app. I have had a similar problem, with the message claiming it has 17029 photos still to upload, after several days of running, that is what it said at the very beginning and it never went lower than that, and the blue bar remains entirely empty.

     

    However if I look at network usage in the activity monitor, I see cloudd uploading at a rate of between 130-150kb/s (about 1Mbps). If I 'pause uploading for 1 day' then I see that traffic cease, and resuming starts it up again. After watching it for a couple of minutes, cloudd had uploaded more than 20MB of data, which has got to be at least 10 or 20 photos, but the progress indicator still hasn't changed!

     

    I hope that it is simply the progress indicator. But I don't see any of the photos appearing in the web version of iCloud that weren't there before I started syncing. I worry that it is in fact using up all my bandwidth uploading my photos to nowhere!!!

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 22, 2015 6:23 AM in response to EvilPuppetMaster
    Level 9 (50,086 points)
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    Apr 22, 2015 6:23 AM in response to EvilPuppetMaster

    130 to 140kbps is not "about 1Mbps, it's not even close, 1Mbps is 1000Kbps

     

    your speed is exceptionally low, it is so slow that it does not make any sense to try to use an online picture library.

  • by EvilPuppetMaster,Helpful

    EvilPuppetMaster EvilPuppetMaster Apr 22, 2015 7:54 AM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Apr 22, 2015 7:54 AM in response to Csound1

    That should have read 150kB/s, as in kilobytes, which is about 1 megabit. And yes, that's still pretty slow, but given I am in Australia and I can see that icloud is uploading to Amazon S3 in North Virginia, it seems unlikely that it's only my own ISP or connection to blame. In other scenarios I usually see uploads around 3-7mbps. Given that Apple have released this as a worldwide service, it doesn't seem too much to ask that they make each client sync with their nearest S3 data centre (in my case, Sydney).

     

    Anyhow, since my last post, I have started seeing the number tick down slowly. My suspicion now is that for some reason it started with my video files, and so had to upload relatively large amounts of data before seeing an appreciable movement in the number of items.

     

    For or anyone else wondering if their upload is really happening or not, I suggest looking in Activity Monitor under 'Network'. If iCloud is syncing properly, you should see relatively large amounts of outgoing traffic for a process called cloudd.

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