iCloud Photo Library Upload - Extremely Slow Uploads

This thread was very helpful. Here are the steps that worked for me on Mac. (Sierra - 10.12.5)

• System Preferences > Energy Saver. Turn display off "never". Uncheck "Put hard discs to sleep when possible" and "Enable Power Nap". Check "Schedule..." and make sure both boxes are unchecked.
• System Preferences > Desktop and Screen Saver. Start after "Never"
• Close all applications.
• Open Photos
• Open Photos > Preferences > iCloud tab
• Open Activity Monitor > Network tab and click the "Sent Packages" header to sort high to low (it toggles). Click on "cloudd" to highlight
• At this point the upload should have started, and you can monitor the Sent Bytes and Sent Packets to ensure that things are moving along. The graphic at the bottom is very helpful, and pay particular attention to Packets out/sec. I think mine showed around 150 packets out per second, sometimes less.
• Keep these screens visible at all times and don't touch the computer. If you have to use the computer, then click "Pause for one day" in the Preferences screen and "Resume" when you are done with your task, after turning off any other applications. Make sure that the upload is again functioning as before.
• Check your computer monitor during the day. If the Activity Monitor shows that the process has stopped, then I was able to restart it by rebooting the computer and repeating the steps.
• I had about 11,000 photos and they took about 3 days to upload. A check of iCloud showed that all uploaded and everything appears identical to the content in Mac Photos.

I spoke to Apple Support on this issue who looked at my screen while I was trying to upload. I have an ethernet connection with upload speed of 6mbps so pretty quick. I tried the suggestions of stopping the processes in Activity Monitor. I signed out and in to iCloud and stopped iCloud on other devices. I messed around for 2 days, and had managed to upload 21 photos of my 21000! (It had actually stalled too as obviously shouldn't be that slow!).

Unchecking the iCloud library in preferences now and again seemed to 'reboot' the process.
So then I called Apple Support who saw that each photo was taking about 3 minutes (when actually uploading at all) and she said it was normal and I should expect to wait months for all my pictures to upload.
These are speeds from the dawn of the internet, so I have downgraded the cloud storage and have used an alternative.
As someone pointed out, this is not really a back up anyway, as if your photos accidentally get deleted on one device, they will across the library too.
My solution: I had already exported the albums to a HDD to have a local back up in a jpeg format, and I just copied them over to the new cloud service folder and it took 18 minutes! It just means manually exporting albums as when I create them, but essentially I have nearly 100% of my photos safely stored in the cloud, which was the goal.

I'm having this problem too with my iMac which has a wifi connection to my 150MBS service into my house. I have a 180GB photo library in Photos. I recently moved into photos so I could access the photos across my iphone, ipad and macbook.

After almost a month, I'm still only 28GB uploaded. My issue (when observing behaviour with cloudd using activity monitor) is the data sent/sec can vary from 2.5MBPS to 10 bytes (not even kilobytes).

So far I have:

- disabled other internet services (e.g. backblaze)

- switched off photostream

- opted to store photos on the imac (I noticed storing in the cloud resulted in slower upload times)

- disabled screen, hard drive, computer sleeps (all of which caused the upload to cease according to activity monitor)

- do not use the computer for anything - leaving photos the only application open (other than activity monitor) and "on top"

Currently as I write I'm enjoying uploads of 4.37kb per sec. I will be dead before this ever finishes 😟 I am not being throttled by my ISP as I can upload to other sites normally.

How can I force a faster upload? I feel totally ripped off having just upgraded to a 200GB cloud service just for the photos storage.

I paid to upgrade from 50 GB to 200 GB last December (2016) and started to upload my files and photos to iCloud. I have about 130 GB to upload. Now 10 April 2017 I still have another 14 GB to go. So it has taken me 3 ½ months and I am not there yet! I call it a scam.

Hi all!

First of all let me say this: after I learned about Photos and iCloud, it sounds like it is made for me. I was looking for exact a solution like this. Sync with Photo, iPhone and iCloud, no worries with managing my photo's any more.

But... I have had the exact same issue as described in this topic by many people. Photo's app iCloud sync was loading very slow, and even some times it looks like it wasn't even uploading my photos at all. I was constantly checking icloud.com/photos to see the result of my upload, but unfortunately not many progress. I had about 100 GB on data, around 27.000 photos.

[POSSIBLE SOLUTION]

Then I found some kind of way to get this whole problem solved. It's not like it should be, but for me it helped me very much. You need to open Photo's app and go to 'preferences' (of course all the iCloud settings should be okey, but I assume this is already done correct in your situation). In this window you should open the iCloud tab, and now most important: leave this iCloud screen open. Then within about 2 to 10 mins it's starting to upload, not really fast, but at least it continues uploading. I needed to keep this screen open to let the iCloud sync continue.

Before this workaround my Photos app on my iMac was loading for days (I think I've had it open for like 60 days, assuming that it probably takes so long to upload just 100 MB). But after I discovered leaving this window open, within one night it uploaded more then 30GB already. Now it's almost finished uploading (100GB, all in less then 2 days) which is fine to me.

I know this is not a solution as it should be, but for me it helped me very much. Please remind the following things:
- Make sure your Photos and iCloud settings are define correct
- Leave the iCloud tab on the preference window open

- For me it was even necessary to leave it REAL open, not other windows, Fined or other application active.

- Also keep in mind about your sleep modus settings (should be turned off).

Hope this solution is also working for you guys!

Useruser

I have had the same problem too. After many days only a a few hundred MB of a 17GB photos library had been uploaded. But when i checked the upload speed in activity monitor I found that the speed increased each time I brought the Photos app to the front, but then it reduced a few minutes later. So I wrote an Apple Script to activate Photos automatically every 3 minutes and have now managed to upload several GB over one night.

Surely this is not the way Photos is intended to work?

I had this same problem on my iPhone 5S with over 9000 photos to upload. The upload seemed to stop if the iPhone display turned off. Although the process was still slow I managed to keep the upload constant by turning off the display lock.

Settings > DIsplay and Brightness > Auto-Lock and choose Never.

Don't forget to change the display lock time back when the upload process is over or if you need to leave your network.

Its not you, many are seeing slow iCloud uploads of their Photos library. I have a small 3K pic library that has been taking days to upload and when I do have the upload running its been severely impacting the performance of my internet. I've been pausing it during the day and letting it run overnight.

I'd guess that Apple is doing throttling and are getting hammered by millions of people running photo uploads right now, or a likely combination of both. You might want to leave your upload paused for a week or two and then try again after things settle down. Looks like my upload is going to complete today so fingers crossed.

Tell me 2 things: the total size of your library and the actual upload speed. Test your upload speed here and post the result. Then I can tell you the minimum time possible.

I only have 41 photos on my iphone 6. It started uploading to my icloud account, but got stuck. now it says...Uploading 24 items and it is been over 4 hours.

I am having the same problem. I have a library of approximately 16000 photos. Since the launch of Yosemite 10.3 with the new photos app I have increased my storage in iCloud. In the last six days I have managed to upload only 450 photos. At this rate it will take months to complete. I have test my download speed at 14.19 Mbps and my upload speed at 1.06Mbps.

jimjo wrote:

I have test my download speed at 14.19 Mbps

That would be quite good if you were downloading, but you're not downloading so it is not relevant. 1.06Mb/s is the speed that matters, and it is very low.

At that speed it will take 2 hours 35 minutes per Gigabyte uploaded, that's the best case.

I have an iPhone 6, a mini and a laptop and its taking the slow boat to China to upload. All my photos are on my IMAC 14,000. This is ridiculous! This might take weeks. Is there any way of speeding it up? I have spoken to APPLE care 3 times regarding the uploads. No one told me it might take a week!