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iCloud photo library taking weeks to upload

I upgraded my iCloud storage plan and activated iCloud Photo Library on my primary Mac 7 days ago. I have 13,149 photos and 417 videos. The Photos library in Finder is 133 GB. I set my Mac to never go to sleep so the library can upload even when I'm not using it. It's been 7 days and it says "Uploading 12,275 items."


I have a decent internet connection and can usually get 1-3 mbps upload speeds consistently through my Airport Express. I realize this isn't the fastest speed, but even doing a conservative estimate at 0.5 mbps, the 133 GB should be uploaded in less than four days. It's been 7 days and it's not even 1/10th finished. At this rate it's going to take two months of my Mac running constantly, and I don't have the patience for that as it bogs my internet connection.


Any ideas of what might be wrong or how I might speed this up?

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Apr 19, 2015 11:51 AM

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Posted on Apr 19, 2015 12:36 PM

Hi, cwizz792:


Many other people are experiencing this as well. Personally, I suspect there's a bug in the iCloud daemon (cloudd) which is responsible for uploads and downloads to the cloud.


Have you looked at the network stats in the "Network" tab of the Activity Monitor? This can tell you what your Mac is experiencing in terms of upload speed. My ISP's "guarantee" is 864 kbps, but I'm actually seeing about 140 kbps, or about 1/7 of what I should be seeing (all being ideal).


My actual speed, according to my ISP, was about 2/3 the advertised speed, and a technician came out an rewired my jack, which did get me to the "ideal" value as measured by his little instrument. But my upload of the photos only increased from about 100 kbps to 140 kbps, or about a 40% increase.


From that I conclude the something in the Apple software is messing around. Some people more knowledgeable that I about network protocols are saying that the software is mucking with the modem in funny ways, resulting in fractions of the achievable speed in some cases and in shutting down the connection for at least one model of modem.


People are complaining to Apple about this, and I'm planning to add my input as we'll, so perhaps we'll get some action from Apple on this.


Stay tuned and hang in there!

14 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Apr 19, 2015 12:36 PM in response to cwizz792

Hi, cwizz792:


Many other people are experiencing this as well. Personally, I suspect there's a bug in the iCloud daemon (cloudd) which is responsible for uploads and downloads to the cloud.


Have you looked at the network stats in the "Network" tab of the Activity Monitor? This can tell you what your Mac is experiencing in terms of upload speed. My ISP's "guarantee" is 864 kbps, but I'm actually seeing about 140 kbps, or about 1/7 of what I should be seeing (all being ideal).


My actual speed, according to my ISP, was about 2/3 the advertised speed, and a technician came out an rewired my jack, which did get me to the "ideal" value as measured by his little instrument. But my upload of the photos only increased from about 100 kbps to 140 kbps, or about a 40% increase.


From that I conclude the something in the Apple software is messing around. Some people more knowledgeable that I about network protocols are saying that the software is mucking with the modem in funny ways, resulting in fractions of the achievable speed in some cases and in shutting down the connection for at least one model of modem.


People are complaining to Apple about this, and I'm planning to add my input as we'll, so perhaps we'll get some action from Apple on this.


Stay tuned and hang in there!

Apr 25, 2015 4:16 AM in response to cwizz792

I started to sync my library over a week ago (~25,000 photos) and it's still going 24/7. I can't tell if anything has been uploaded or not. When I log into iCloud via Safari, the only thing that shows up is my old monthly photo streams and a ton of empty albums so something is happening, but I can't see any photos that have been copied. Does anyone know how to monitor what has actually been uploaded?

Apr 25, 2015 5:48 AM in response to cwizz792

I was having the same issue (25,000 images, 525 videos). Through some combination of trial and error I got it to start feeding them through. I'm sorry that I wasn't more methodical, but here are the steps that I tried:



Turned off iCloud. Turned it back on. (a couple of times)

Closed and reopened Photos (many times)

Rebooted.

Went to Energy Saver settings, and made sure that me Mac was set not to sleep, ever.

Started the upload again, keeping Photos open.


Something worked, and it ended up taking about 2 days to upload all the items, which seems about right. Once it started working in ernest, it was uploading just about 1000 images per hour. My local storage size is 143 GB, and the iCloud size is about 120 GB.


I used Activity Monitor and looked at the network activity to see if anything was working. There were a couple of candidate processes, but I just sorted on highest data volume and it soon became clear which process was responsible.


Sorry I can't give you the three step process in the order that worked - but it seems that the cloudd daemon gets stuck sometimes, and needs to be prodded to get it moving again.

Apr 25, 2015 6:01 AM in response to stapes13

Keep Photos on top!


Just played around with this some more using Activity Monitor during a large photo download from iCloud.


When Photos is the top window - in the forefront - download speeds are running over 10 MB/s - up to over 13 MB/s.

When Photos is not the top window - when I have File Manager or Activity Monitor on top - downloads drop to 80-100 KB/s.


It may be anecdotal - but the graph seems pretty clear. Photos on top, lots of speed. Photos not on top, a trickle of data.


It must be designed so that if you have Photos running in the back ground it doesn't impact what you are doing so much.

Apr 25, 2015 9:26 AM in response to stapes13

OK. I think the sequence is to turn off iCloud photo library, quit iPhoto, and restart the system. Upon restart, open iPhoto, and then turn on iCloud Photo Library. At decent broadband upload speeds, this is still a painful process, but at least with this sequence, days of nothing happening appear to be over.

Apr 26, 2015 11:08 PM in response to el336

I had 16,784 items to upload. I started yesterday at 7:07 pm. I had Photo on top and I did not run anything else. Anytime the backup started, if I noticed it, I stopped it. I had my Mac set to not sleep, not even the display. I just finished the upload at about 10:45 pm, so it took about 27 hours to complete. If I had turned my time machine back ups off, it probably would have finished a lot faster.

Apr 28, 2015 6:34 PM in response to cwizz792

This killed my internet connection for two weeks, and I could not figure it out except to know that it all started with the upgrade to photos. When I looked at the network stats, it was continuously uploading gigabytes of data, but nothing was changing from the photos preferences pages, and it was stuck on 15,000+ items for days. Thanks to the "escalation" specialist at my Internet company, we isolated the problem to my laptop. I have 2 mbps up and 40 mbps down, so speed was not the problem. I couldn't get it to actively upload my photos. My internet connection was fine and robust as long as I paused the upload of photos in the iCloud preferences of photo.


What made the difference is that I logged *completely* out of iCloud on my laptop, and logged back in. I then restarted the computer and things began to upload, and the file numbers on the iCloud preference page of Photos reflected positive activity. I would pause the upload during the day while I was working, and then allow it to run all night while sleeping. After two nights, all items uploaded and everything back to normal.


Now my iCloud preference page looks like this:


User uploaded file

Jun 27, 2015 4:01 AM in response to Stephen Hanson

To complete my posts...


I finally got all my pics to upload - turned everything off except iCloud, plugged laptop in, turned power management to 'never ever off', and then turned display brightness to off and just left it for a few days!!


Not the most elegant solution but it worked.


For new photos since then I have been just taking my comp to work and using their internet - I was getting 200kb/s upload at home compared to several Mb/s at work.

Oct 25, 2016 4:14 PM in response to Eric Root

Solved my problem,
Just turn OFF anything to do with Apple Photo, install third party software and 30 sec later photos are available on every device I have, be it Windows, macOS, Android, IOS or whatever. In two hours I have all my Photos from my windows machine (750+) available everywhere.

and my internet can now be used for other things instead of "uploading two Photo's in Apple Photo's


Happy chappy..

iCloud photo library taking weeks to upload

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