Q: iCloud Photo Library Upload - Extremely Slow Uploads

This also seems to have speeded things up for me - Thanks for the tip!

Also, on iCloud.com, it only took a few minutes to prepare my library first time, despite there being over 2000 photos in it that had already uploaded from Photos on my rMBP...

I signed up for icloud's paid plan to store my media on icloud. Like everyone else here, I am seeing incredibly slow uploads on the Mac. I have about 5K worth of media and it has been 4 days, and so far, only 1K worth of media has been uploaded. The upload time feels like the 90s. Google's Photos upload is much snappier. Quite disappointed with this service.

thanks for shareing

LN

my upload speed is 3.2 mbps.  Thanks for the test.  I think it is going to take a long long time.

It isn't any bandwidth issues as people were try to say. It's ridiculous but it seems that Photos app uploading photos only when it's visible and screen isn't locked. In the same network Android phone upload photos to their services in seconds.

Lothar Hagano wrote:

 

It isn't any bandwidth issues as people were try to say. It's ridiculous but it seems that Photos app uploading photos only when it's visible and screen isn't locked. In the same network Android phone upload photos to their services in seconds.

Photos doe not ONLY upload when it is visible - it does only upload while the Mac is awake so set it not to sleep and keep connected to the internet and it willupload

As to your preferences for using an Android Phone - no problem - Photos is totally optional and if you do not like it you can use anything else you prefer - what hardware and what software you use if totally up to you, choose to use  things you like rather than things you do not like

LN

I said about other devices only to show that there are no bandwidth issues. And I'm talking about time which Photos need to transfer data from iPhone to Macbook through iCloud, while both of them are switch on and running. After iPhone screen is locked, for example for 5 minutes, in settings menu of Photos&Camera there is message "last synchronisation 5 minutes ago". After it, synchronisation is continued (animated icon near wifi icon on systembar). So there are no synchronisation from iPhone to iCloud while iPhone is locked.

i actually stopped with this service. slow slow slow, waited for days to upload only 1300 files of 9000. Sometimes nothing seems to happen. it is a pity as when it would work as it should work it could be a great service. now i'm stuck with a NAS in my home. Of course you can go to free services from google or flickr or what ever service but they all spam you with adds or you sell you data to others. There is no such thing as a free lunch after all.

When it comes to cloud services i'm always very disappointed in apple, they do not seem to get it right.

You're not helping, Larry

The loop command has typos.  The correct one is:

while [ 1 ]; do lsof -c cloudd | grep filecache; date; sleep 5; done

Also, I found that part of the problem I had was that each time I locked my machine using Hot Corners (I had Hot Corners feature configured so that my Mac locks when I move the cursor to the top-left corner), iCloud Photo Library uploads stopped.  They resumed after I unlock the machine AND went back to Photos.

If I lock the machine using the keyboard shortcut (Command+Option+Eject), then the uploads would not stop.  Bad bug in there...

Note: Hot Corners feature is hidden in  System Preferences > Mission Control > Hot Corners.  From now on, I will not use Hot Corners to lock my Mac and just use Command+Option+Eject.

Thanks for posting the fix.  Easier to read results if you slip a "| tail -c -20" in there to see only the last 20 characters of the filenames. I'm watching my 60K photo collection upload slowwwwly ! But its moving without hanging. It looks like my iMac is pumping out a ISP-limited stream of 3MB/s (24mb/s) but still only maybe 30 photos per min. Not sure where the rest of the bandwidth is going.

while [ 1 ]; do lsof -c cloudd | grep filecache | tail -c -20; date; sleep 5; done

BTW - I have tried both Flickr and Google Photos via the new automated uploaders. Both uploads are much faster, and run nicely in the background incrementally uploading.  BUT they are both heinously lossy, losing all metadata that is not stored in the JPG itself (dates, locations, faces). Both also screw up structure of the photo database, especially if one changes contents of events. 

Please, oh please, Apple, make iCloud upload faster while still keeping all metadata and structure.

Apple is not here - this is strictly a user to user support forum - http://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

LN

So we can just plug that command into terminal?

<Edited by Host>

nm got it!