Wasting Disk Space

Apple's iCloud Photo Library for Windows is seriously bugged, resulting in an unusable service.
Further findings:

As I wrote earlier in my (bug)report overhere : Re: Re: Re: Wasting Disk Space, I (like many more people) am experiencing huge issues using the Apple service 'iCloud Photo Library for Windows'.

To give a brief summary of my report:

• When you use iCloud Photo Library on your iPhone or iPad and select 'Optimize iDevice Storage', ICPL saves thumbnails of your original sized photos on your iDevice. The original sized versions are stored in the iCloud. This makes it now impossible to backup those photos from your iDevice to your PC (Windows) by using an USB cable and transfer/import your local iDevice photos to your local harddisk on your PC. Because there are no fullsized photos anymore to transfer, only thumbnails. Apple offers the enduser an alternative way (and it should indeed!) to transfer/backup your original full sized photos (and videos) to your PC.
  
  By going to Windows Explorer, go to the iCloud Photos link (not the physical folder itself) and press the button [Download photos and videos] we can download all (or by year) our photos and videos that are residing in the iCloud.
• And here (downloading our precious material from the iCloud locally to a Windows PC) the system fails on us. ICPL for Windows uses this folder to save it's large cache files: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos\MMCS. And in certain cases these cache files are not deleted during the download proces and even worse.... they are build up endlessly: resulting in our harddrives to become flooded with unnecessary files. At one point this caused my local C: (OS) drive to only have 55 MB left! And so ICPL could not download anything anymore from it's Cloud... since there was no space anymore for the cache files (or even your downloaded photos if they were on the same drive!)
  
  I needed to turn off ICPL for Windows in the end, so that my OS drive was safe from anymore wasted space.
  ICPL for Windows was unable to provide me with proper downloads of the years that contained the most photos in my iCloud Photo Library. So, after I initially happily converted both my iPhone and iPad to use iCloud Photo Library (it does work great on iOS), Apple makes it impossible for me to have a safe copy of those precious photos and videos on my Windows PC.

So. I decided to test it further, to see if I could find a workaround to finally have a proper local full-sized backup of all my iCloud photos on my Windows PC. TommyLux in this discussion above ( ℹ feature suggestion for this community software: please Apple... provide the users of your community software with a way to refer (url) to individual postings inside discussions) mentioned he used a so-called junction to trick the ICFW software to write it's cache files to another drive than your C: (OS) drive. So this is what I did:

- Disabled ICPL for Windows (via iCloud for Windows client),

- Created folder D:\iCloudPhotoLibraryTest,

- Renamed folder C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos

to: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos_old,

- Opened the CMD prompt,

- Put this in: mklink /J "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos" "D:\iCloudPhotoLibraryTest",
- Enable ICPL for Windows (via die iCloud for Windows client).

This way you trick the ICFW software that it thinks it is writing it's MMCS folder and cache files to C: , but in fact physically they are on D:

And this worked! When I enabled ICFW again and waited half an hr (for some ICFW preparation processes to finish), I was able to press the button [Download photos and videos] inside Windows Explorer again and I was able to download my photos by year (or all). ICFW created a new MMCS folder inside D:\iCloudPhotoLibraryTest and started to fill up that folder on my D:drive with cache files the moment I selected to download year 2007 (which is the first year that is available on my iCloud Library).

Great! This way I succesfully prevented my C: (OS)-drive to be filled up again by the cache flood that ICFW was generating before. I decided to open a Window on both

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos\MMCS and D:\iCloudPhotoLibraryTest\MMCS to visually monitor what was happeing with these cache files. Well... when I downloaded the following years:

- 2015 (290 photos, 1 video)

- 2014 (173 photos, 1 video)

- 2013 (228 photos, 11 videos)

- 2012 (3 photos)

- 2011 (1 photos)

- 2010 (3 photos)

- 2009 (2 photos)

- 2008 (2 photos)

- 2007 (1 photos)

... I could see that all the associated cache files in the MMCS folder were deleted immediately the moment after a photo or video was downloaded! (I made a video of it, for future reference). This is how it is supposed to work! Obviously.

If only it worked so flawlessly on every year.... because on the years 2016 and 2017 it unfortunately goes terribly wrong:

- 2017 (3.338 photos, 136 videos)

- 2016 (2.197 photos, 83 videos)

During downloading of the year 2016, at some point in the process the cache files are no longer deleted. As an example in my case: first... there are some 60 cache files present, which later become 146 files. In the end these files take up 17 GB (whereas the actual photos inside the whole 2016 year only consists of 12 GB physically). I notice that the ICFW client says at almost the end of the process: 8 items to download. And it stays there for a long time. I decided to leave the PC on the whole night... so 8 hrs later I return from sleep and ICFW says: everything downloaded at 04:54! Great (although... leaving your PC on the whole night for 8 items to finish should not be needed in the first place!). I check the MMCS folder and it still contains 174 (!!!) cache files that take up 20GB on my harddrive. (As I stated... the photos themselves from 2016 only take up 12 GB physically)

I decide to restart my PC. After booting up, the junction is still present (great, so it offers a workable workaround, you only have to set this once) and thankfully... the MMCS folder is empty! So all cache files are deleted after a PC reset.

So this is already an improvement over my previous situation where I did not use a junction to D: and all cache files were written to my C: (OS)-drive. Because then there was no space anymore left on my C: -drive to finish the download proces, because ICFW kept creating piles of cache files during the backup process that in itself could not be finished, because there was no space anymore for any more cache files on C: -drive. In that situation... even when I reset the PC, the MMCS files were first deleted and then rebuild all over again, flooding my C:-drive. It could never finish it's download job and went into an endless loop...

So now I had conquered that by making a junction to the D:-drive. Great.Unfortunately... then the year 2017 came. The year that contained the most photos.

During the first maybe 1000-1500 (I did not check/monitor it precisely) photos everything goes well... but after that suddenly the cache files do not get deleted anymore. At one point I have 67 GB ! build-up cache files, when in fact the photo's themselves take 12,4 GB physical space. As with the year 2016, this 2017 download process get's stuck at the end of it all. ICFW states that is has 27 items to download. This slowly goes down to 14 items. I leave my PC again on the whole night and the next morning the 14 items have been reduced to a whopping 13 items to download. 1 file in 1 night (8 hrs) !!! 😕😠

ICFW left me with only 9,3 GB free ⚠ on my D: -drive, the MMCS folder took up 147 GB ⚠ (!!!) in cache files! I had enough of this **** and I deactivated ICPL in ICFW. Doing this, it removes the MMCS folder (thankfully!). I activate it again and still ICFW states it needs to download 13 items. After a little while it states that all downloads are finished and it does not build up anymore cache.

I had done it! After days and days of struggling and finding a workable solution, the junction did the trick and putting ICPL off and on in ICPW at the very last stage of the download process helped it further.

However, after this journey I checked the endresults on the year 2016 and 2017 download folders:

- 2017: 3.338 photos, 136 videos in iCloud | 3.359 fotos, 122 videos in the download folder. (So, 21 photos more and 14 videos less it downloaded! Puzzling, puzzling, puzzling)

- 2016: 2.197 photos, 83 videos in iCloud | 2.207 photos, 564 videos in the download folder. (10 photos photos more than in the download folder... how come I can have more photos then the source contains? The huge amount of videos are mostly LIVE photos from my iPhone, which are saved as videos (logically) instead of photos.

So the numbers do not add up perfectly.

All in all this experience with Apple's iCloud Photolibrary for Windows has been extremely user-unfriendly. The opposite of what we expect from Apple.

Conclusion:

- In my previous posting I said: 'According to him the cache will be deleted automatically the moment ICPL for Windows has downloaded all the photos from your iCloud Photo Library to your PC'. This is not true I found out. It already deletes the specific cachefile the moment it has downloaded the specific photo/video. At least... in the beginning of a year download that is.

- In my previous posting I said: 'I asked him why on Earth the cache files take 22 GB away from my PC, whereas the 2016 folder is only like 11 GB large?! That is double the amount of cache for photo's that take only 11 GB in space! It does not make sense . He told me that ICPL does not look at which year you have downloaded already... it simply caches the complete iCloud Photo Library to your C: drive!'. This is also not true, as you can see when you have read my extensive posting above.

Obviously Apple's system is bugged:

1. It seems that when you download a large (just more then a few hundred photos) photo collection, during downloading it does not delete the associated cachefiles anymore,
2. It seems that at the end of a large download proces, ICFW keeps hanging on the last couple of photos and finds itself in an seemingly endless process of building up cache files and not downloading anything for an endless amount of hours.

All in all Apple's iCloud Photo Library for Windows is an unusable product/service and it is remarkable that apparently they know about these cache issues and do not provide the Windows userbase (which is huge) with a proper solution/service by now. Or does it only happen to a few customers/PC setups? Still... it does not work on mine and that of many other Apple customers.

I do love Apple on many levels, but this service/situation does not fall under that umbrella.

Please offer us a bugfix soon! I want/prefer to use Apple instead of Google for my photos, but this forces us to trust other solutions, unfortunately. Thank you very much,

Apple and Google haven't done a good job when it comes to photo cloud storage.

I'm using ~100GB of iPhoto storage. I have some images and videos which i imported from Camera connection kit.

I had to create a junction point to re-locate the CloudKit\iCloud Photos\MMCS folder to v:

Although I have a 100gb photo library, it literally takes as much space as I give it. ~500gb.

It burns through my broadband. Imagine what my ISP thinks of me.

Google photos backup is also crap, it doesn't seem to want to upload some of my photos on IOS or windows.

Fix please!

Tom

Further info on Apple's iCloud Photo Library for Windows cache issues.

Unfortunately... it looked like the good news would be that by installing the most recent update of iCloud for Windows (7.1.0) these issues would be gone. Because I saw that the MMCS cache was building itself less quickly then before after installing this update... but as I write this report now, my OS drive is slowly but steadily flooded again by Apple's cache files inside the MMCS folder 😕.

I wanted to write a bugreport to Apple, but since there is not much text space you can use in their form over there : Feedback - iCloud - Apple , I will write it here:

---
Dear Apple,

I love your products. Maybe even better if I would own a Mac, but as it is with the majority of people, I don't. I use a Windows 10 PC and unfortunately I had to find out by a really frustrating experience that one of the Apple Services does not function on my Windows PC. In fact, it has a profound negative effect on the performance/state of my working machine. Here is what happens:

I wanted to use iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone (6S), iPad (4) and my PC (Win 10). On the iDevices it works flawlessly. Great! I still own a 5 year old iPad 4th generation running iOS 10 and this machine is the best thing I ever bought. My iPhone and my iPad (first Apple products I bought) made me an Apple fan, but I am hugely disappointed and dissatisfied about the level of service/care you offer the Windows user base out there.

Because, when I setup iCloud Photo Library on my PC, things go wrong. Remarkably wrong.

You see, I use now 'optimize storage' on my iPhone and iPad, so I have thumbnails of my original full-sized pictures on these device. (That is one of the beauties of iCloud Photo Library, at least on iOS) That means, that I can not backup those pictures anymore via a USB cable and import them to my PC the good old fashioned way. Because there are no full-sized photos anymore to backup... they have become thumbnails! This is expected obviously, so Apple should offer us an alternative way to backup our valued photos/videos on a physical drive. And it does. By going to Windows Explorer, go to the iCloud Photos link (not the physical folder itself) and press the button [Download photos and videos] we can download all (or by year) our photos and videos that are residing in the iCloud. Perfect! This is exactly what we need... we want and need to be able to make a physical backup of all the photos and videos in our iCloud. (Because the old way via an USB cable for example does not work anymore).

Unfortunately, the new way that iCloud Photo Library offers us on Windows... does also not work! (At least not on my work system).

I downloaded my photos and videos year by year:

2015 (290 foto) ok

2014 (173 foto) ok

2013 (228 foto) ok

2012 (3 foto) ok

2011 (1 foto) ok

2010 (3 foto) ok

2009 (2 foto) ok

2008 (2 foto) ok

2007 (1 foto) ok

... all went fine, all these years were downloaded to D:\Mijn afbeeldingen\iCloud Photos\Downloads. Until I needed to download the year 2016 (2.197 fotos) (2763 incl videos). After a while I suddenly I received the message from Windows that my C: drive (OS drive) was full! Strange, because I normally have 25GB free on that drive (it's only 75GB in size), since I put all data on D: anyway, this 25GB never get's filled up.

But not when we use Apple's iCloud for Windows! As the reports of all customers above already point out, the problem is this folder: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos\MMCS... it gets completely filled up with cache files. At one point my 25GB free space went down to... 55 MB (!!!).

And so I am stuck. My Windows system get's stuck by this Apple Service. ICPL for Windows could not finish syncing this 2016 year/folder, because my C: - drive became chuck full with cache files! :

(It's in Dutch... saying Your pc is full and it can not sync anything anymore).

So what to do? The only way to get rid of these MMCS files was to restart my PC. That freed up 22 GB of these files and I had again 25GB free space at my disposal on my OS drive. As I write this report however... ICPL for Windows is again filling up the MMCS folder and still ICPL for Win tells me (see screenshot) it needs to download 4 items.

I called Apple in the weekend and a senior adviser asked it to his colleagues and they told him and me that this was 'expected behavior' on a Windows PC! Because Windows demands cache files to be written to C: .
Well... that in itself might be expected behaviour, but I as an enduser I obviously do not expect my OS drive to be filled up to the top with cache files that are as big as the size of my physical photos that are downloaded to the D: - drive (and as it turns out even bigger)!

Today I called with another senior adviser and he was more helpful and insightful : he explained that Apple's Support employees get actually instructed to give a reply like 'expected behaviour' in certain situations, but he gave me much more info and better help. He told me this:

- More customers reported this issue, but it does not happen to all customers. They don't know yet why.
- Probably it will help if you [download the photos and videos] to the same drive as where the cache files reside. I did not test that yet (I can't because my C: drive does not have enough space), so [Request] if someone in this discussion above can try this out and see what happens? And report it back here. Thank you.
- According to him the cache will be deleted automatically the moment ICPL for Windows has downloaded all the photos from your iCloud Photo Library to your PC. Since that is not the case in... my case ;-) (cause it still needs to download 4 pics from 2016 and 3.000 pics from 2017 that I did not select yet), it keeps regenerating the MMCS folder cache,
- I asked him why on Earth the cache files take 22 GB away from my PC, whereas the 2016 folder is only like 11 GB large?! That is double the amount of cache for photo's that take only 11 GB in space! It does not make sense 😕. He told me that ICPL does not look at which year you have downloaded already... it simply caches the complete iCloud Photo Library to your C: drive!
And my total library of photos and videos is 32 GB in my iCloud, so I would need 32GB of free space on my C: drive to be able to backup all my iCloud photos/videos to my D: drive. Imagine customers who have a photo/video library of over 500GB! You would need 500GB free space on your OS drive to be enabled by Apple's Service to download your valued photos/video material!!! Seriously? I mean... come on! Imagine that a service like Dropbox fucntions like this , who would ever use such a service again? 😠.
- So this is indeed what they themselves advised Apple customers who are confronted with this frustrating iCloud for Windows service of Apple: to actually disable ICPL for Windows!
- He advised me to download full versions of my photos to an iDevice and then make a manual backup via an USB cable and then import to Windows.... so start back from scratch it seems 😢.

That's it.

And well... I suggest Apple to do the same with this entire iCloud Photo Library for Windows system. Start over... because this system is in it's current state unusable! It makes our PC's unusable and it reflects bad on Apple themselves. I am forced now to try how Google Photos work for backup purposes and I might even need to switch back to Dropbox' photo backup option, since Apple can't deliver in this area.

I do love Apple in fact, but this iCloud Photo Library for Windows gave me the complete opposite experience of what I normally have with Apple products.

Hopefully a solution is in the works, I just simply need to download/backup my valued material that Apple now holds inside it's flawed system!

A frustrated Apple Customer.

Supergrovertje wrote:

I wanted to write a bugreport to Apple, but since there is not much text space you can use in their form over there : Feedback - iCloud - Apple , I will write it here:

Where they will never see it...

Yes, I hope this system gets fixed very soon. I now reported this as a bug overhere: Feedback - iCloud - Apple

Maybe it helps if more people take the same action? I can't get my head around how bad this iCloud Photo Library for Windows service from Apple works. And puzzling why not more customers apparently experience these issues?

Apple, please reply that you are looking into this!!! 😠

Apple will not reply here. This is not a one-to-one support channel for Apple. This is a volunteer run community hosted by Apple.

Nobody here can or will speak for Apple.

https://support.apple.com/contact

or Feedback for Apple goes here >>> http://www.apple.com/feedback/

I too have the same issue. I have about 25 gig of photos in iCloud but my MMCS folder is 218 gigs in size. Quite frankly, this is ridiculous as it ate up all of my storage literally overnight. A response from Apple would be much appreciated.

Update:

I used the instructions posted here:

Set up and use iCloud for Windows - Apple Support

to uninstall iCloud for windows but the MMCS file still exists and is still massive. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm experiencing this issue as well.

Particulars:

• Windows 10 Pro version 10.0.14393 Build 14393.
• iTunes version 12.6.1.25
• iCloud version 6.2.1
• Dell XPS 8300
• Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 12.0 GB
• Intel Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Cores, 8 Logical Processors.
• AppData\Local\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos\MMCS directory fills to capacity of disk with files having names like "tmpm-0x000000000000018b" and ranging from 0 to 850MB and greater.

Apple please help!

Yes the same problem here. Actually the iCloud Windows Client has three Problems:

1. The Windows AppData folder fills with with Gigs of Temporary Files.
2. There is no bandwidth throttle on the Windows Version of the iCloud Client.
3. The Windows iCloud Client does not give real time status of the file upload or download. It rather stays frozen in the system tray.

It seems like we should all submit feedback or a Radar for this.

Have battled this for weeks now until I found this thread. Originally thought it was One Drive (Guess I need to eat my words after going off on Windows 10 & One Drive), & then google chrome/skype settings causing the issue. I just shut off icloud for now & deleted all MMCS files excluding the .cs folder. Not a solution but at least my hard drive is not maxing out every week or two. Feel like we get little to no support for us Microsoft & Apple users. Guess playing nice is hard when your bottom line is impacted. We are consumers too-not mindless sheep😕("...one nation under Corporate with no liberty or justice...")- or at least that's what I tell myself. Would like a solution also.

I like the solution of using OneDrive instead of iCloud. I had both iCloud and OneDrive and started running out of space. I never suspected iCloud until the WinDirStat utility it filled my 500 GB disk with 260 GB of files and then I found this thread. I think Apple would tell us PC users that the solution is to switch to Apple. Not me. I am removing iCloud from my PC right now.

On Win7 here the same problem with actual iCloud-Software. All updates installed an it fill up my C: until 16kB free. I put the Folder to store the Photos on an other drive, works well (all photos are there), but C: will filled all the time.

Since nearly two years no solution for this problem?

Ciao

LNardo

Deleting the tmpm files doesn't seem to do any harm (so far). I've also noticed that they disappear when you reboot anyway.

So that's my temporary fix, until I've got time to delete ALL the files on my iPhone, iPad and iCloud. Backing them up to my PC first of course.

What we REALLY need though, is a fix from Apple so it doesn't happen in the first place.

Still having this problem in August 2017. Went through my data cap three times over. Computer keeps filling up over and over, with no changes to Photo downloads folder. I'm shocked that an issue like this can remain unaddressed for so long. This is not the kind of experience I would have expected from Apple.

Same-o, same-o. I was trying to figure out what happened to my C: drive and while looking thru the folders, I found the culprit: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos\MMCS. It led me to this thread so I wanted to add my name to the growing list of adversely affected users.