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Disabling "My Photo Stream" made photos disappear

I have simple requirements from my photos apps, which is to keep a relatively modest library of photos and videos in sync between all my devices.


For this reason, I have "iCloud Photo Library" enabled on all my devices. I have no desire to stream or share anything, so I keep both "My Photo Stream" and "iCloud Photo Sharing" disabled. I've had it that way on all my Apple devices since iCloud Photo Library was first introduced in beta.


A few days ago I noticed that in the settings for the Photos app on my iPhone, "My Photo Stream" was enabled. I don't know how this happened. It's possible it was a side effect of disabling and re-enabling "iCloud Photo Library" some time ago while troubleshooting an unrelated issue.


Anyway, now that I noticed it was enabled, of course I wanted to disable it. But when I disabled "My Photo Stream", it had the side effect of permanently deleting all the photos in my iCloud Photo Library older than a certain date! They weren't in the Recently Deleted folder; they completely vanished. Newer photos were still OK.


But the older ones had only vanished on my iPhone, not on the Mac. It seems iCloud Photo Library got into a weird state where my library was different on different devices, and it never re-synced again even after waiting a few days (the status permanently said "updating").


I was able to restore normality by disabling and re-enabling iCloud Photo Library on both devices, and recovering the missing photos from a backup.


So, things are back to normal.


But why should disabling My Photo Stream cause some (but not all) of my iCloud Photo Library to disappear? How can I stop My Photo Stream from interfering with things again? It kind of annoys me sitting there waiting to accidentally be enabled and corrupt my photo library.

iPhone 5s, iOS 8.4.1, null

Posted on Sep 3, 2015 3:14 PM

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Disabling "My Photo Stream" made photos disappear

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