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,

Well after some trial and error I managed to get it working. I noticed that the temp files being created were all the same size. So I opene d the files with VLC as i assumed they were videos. Once I knew which videos were causing those temp files I went on my phone and deleted them after I manually backed them up. I then deleted the whole iCloud photos on my PC. Disabled iCloud photo on my PC. Went into app local drive on PC and deleted all temp files including cs. Folder deactivated iCloud photo backup on PC and redownloaded everything minus this big videos that I removed from the phone. Been working fine since, but I have a feeling as soon as I have another video that is 2GB or larger the same will happen.

3/4/2018.

Apples solution: delete the iCloud PC program and redownload it. Your pictures are safe.

Hi Ubuedel and everyone since then, I’ve read them all. I called Apple yesterday and the solution next to the date above was what they gave me.

I recovered my 140G or so of hoarded memory.

I reset my uplink and downlink iCloud folders to an external drive.

I downloaded my pictures last night and I’ll need to check the results later today. Don’t have time yet.

1. The first call to Apple support, the assistant pointed the finger to Windows and washed his hands of the problem. As I asked to speak to someone with more experience - politely, I think - he hung up on me. He had my name and callback number, but he never called back. I didn’t expect it was an accidental hang up, so I called back immediately (during all the second call there were no call waiting notices in my phone).

2. The second assistant was energetic and enthusiastic and knowledgeable. She suggested that the iCloud program could have been corrupted somehow and caused this. Though she statetwd she did not have any expertise with Windows. She recommended that we remove iCloud and download it. I told her I was worried that that might delete my photos and videos on iCloud, Dive etc. She assured me that it will not and that the context was safely in iCloud. She first had me show here where the folder was that was auto filing up. I had previously, in my attempts to find out. What was wrong, I un-hid these folders and I quickly found it and showed it to her. I allowed a visual screen “view” of my PC for her help. She assured me she could only see and. It click or write on my PC. So with her red ppointer she and I communicated on the folders and steps to take. I let her guide me through the program removal and download and upload, even though I’ve done this with other programs, I wanted her assistance as much as possible to avoid another call back to them. We ended our chat call as I now waited by myself for the program to load up. I took care of it and checked on the space and downloaded my pictures.

3. I saw a YouTube video during this time that verified my frustration, that the new iCloud could not allow you to download everything at once. The Control All command does not work there. Highlighting the first folder holding down the Shift key and selecting the last folder does not work either to select the “range of folders” or pictures. But you get around this by going to the option on the iCloud icon right click and get to the download all to download this (I don’t reall it may be the download pictures option, I’m not at my PC). The resulting small pop up window first shows that you can click in the word All, and that highlights the folders underneath it for each of the years that your contents were taken in. Or here, you can click on individual folders, each for a year, to download its contents. Each folder has a number of files within that year

That is where I left it last night, I selected all and I saw that my new location (iCloud download in external drive) slowly was being populated. And the C drive was not being populated where the default was. I had made a new default on this external drive.

The YouTube video also said what I experienced, there is no progress bar to show download progress. Bad. A lot of simple enhancements would make this experience enjoyable - possibly in the Old Apple management of Steve Jobs, possibly. Most likely Apple doesn’t care much for us Windows users her (but our work has us going to PCs). This is all at home for personal use for me.

I hope that my pictures downloaded correctly and that I stopped cramming the “UNSTOPABLE BLOB” of files on my C drive and now stopped it in my new external he location. You youngsters. :-) See the Steve McQueen movie “The Blob”. Loved it. While there, see Damm Yankees, another favorite of mine. Say hi to Lola for me. :-)

So again to remind us:

4. This forum is not read nor monitored by Apple,, as other gracious repliers have said, and we must call Apple support, in the upper right corner of this blog for help.

5. I appreciate the guidance of many of our bloggers who helped me try things and get to this point.

6. Delete iCloud, because it could have been corrupted somehow since your initial use and redownload and load it again. Our pictures are safe in the iCloud during this time. I recommend you relocating your download and upload folders to an external drive.

7. After I get all the downloads, I will back this new set of files again in a secondary extwrnal drive, thigh I think I have them already backup before uploading them into iCloud, I will referido.

My detailed write up is only to hopefully help others and to lessen the time on this troubling effort.

Sincerely,

Redwood222

LA, California

I had the same problem on my Windows 10 x64 machine and iCloud 7.3 version. I've suddenly run out my 250 GB HDD space when was downloading 21 GB of photos!

CloudKit\iCloud Photos\MMCS folder's size was 135 GB about.

To solve it I just did a restart and after the restart all these fieles were automaticly wiped by iCloud Drive. Seems some kind of a bug

I have /had the same problem

The first solution was in icloud manager in windows disable the photo option. (this is supposed to be the fix)

Then inside I selected folders in another drive where to store the folders in another drive (my c drive is ssd and has very limited space).

Then deactivate the photos again.

That worked for a while - I have recently changed iphone's and I also started using icloud music... so for some reason the tempfiles were back... but all I had to do is reselect the folders I created prior and the space cleared right up.

I can't say its going to work forever, but that cleared my space in my c drive.

Guess I'm the latest to have this issue. I turned off iCloud photos on the iCloud settings window, and it immediately cleared up the 350+GBs it was hogging just to store about 50GBs of pics and movies. I'll be stopping my 200GB iCloud storage, finding something else. I'll keep my iphone, I still like that very much, but I'm not using any Apple cloud services until they fix this. back to syncing and just taking photos off my phone onto my PC.

Unbelievable that Apple hasn't addressed this after two years, but typical.

Ben855,

Sorry to hear that what helped me didn’t not help you. Can you also do what I did? Set the location of your new downloaded iCloud folder in an external drive.

This allowed the MMCS files that had eaten all my memory to be removed from the PC and if they were to grow, they would grow on my external drive. I figured this would leave my PC usable with space. It did work that way.

I believe I restarted my PC after installing. So far since I posted and did this, I’ve left my PC run overnight downloading my pictures onto the external drive. No large MMCS files on my PC nor inbox my external drive.

But, one unexpected thing happened. I noticed that after on night of leaving my PC on, all the disk was filled up! I didn’t see MMCS files in the PC. I haven’t had time to investigate that. But after restarting my PC after that, the full disc C was NOT full and had the 157 Gigs free, or what ever it was exactly (don’t remember). I’ve been occupied with other things, but I think this happened to me on two separate different pc-running-over-night situations. And the full disc C was cleared up after restarting my PC. Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to investigate where the files grew to fill up all my memory space.

I started to use a Fan program that maps pictorially where your data is on your PC folders, but I stopped half way due to lack of time. It shows you in concentric rings folder sizes -as you have onion layers of folders. This is how I first found out where the hidden folder path was with MMCS files. It will be anle to see which folder is huge and unexpected.

Hope someone else may have a permanent solution.

Apple does not monitor this site for problems. Call them yourself for over the phone talks. Thanks.

My solution using windows 7 was this...

I uninstalled "iCloud" in prgrams and feature then i went to c: users, app-data, local, apple inc and finally deleted the culprit "cloudkit" file which contained 330gb I then saw my HD go from red to free space...alas!

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.

I was not able to move the folder to an external drive (I don't have a big enough one) but after uninstalling iCloud, I was able to delete the folder C:\Users\username\Appdata\Local rec laming my space without any problems. I will try reinstalling iCloud when I have more time.

To quote myself:

And this worked. Now when I switch of/on the iCPL in the iCloud for Win app, this [iCloud Photos] folder junction is not affected. Also it survices a PC reset! So the junction is active and stays put, but... I can't use it!

If I press [Photo and video download]-button on the iCloud-foto's quicklink in Win Explorer, it gives me the message that my Photolibrary is being prepared. But... it keeps giving me this message... so downloading my pics and vids from iCloud to my PC locally is STILL not possible this way!

What a frustrating service Apple has created for Windows users! Extremely userunfriendly... something not to be expected of a brand like Apple.

Well... I think I simply needed to wait longer for iCloud FotoLib for Windows to prepare itself. Because I found out later that this process takes in fact a while (could be an hr), so I did not give myself enough time to discover that this junction actually might have worked as a workaround for Apple's flawed system.

However! I have *very* good news! ..... see my next post:

Okay Ben855. I understand.

I had a thought for you. Before your c drive becomes completely filled up after you load the iCloud program, download a selected year or two from iCloud and immediately put those into a different cloud saving service? Hopefully you can download and repulías into the cloud before your disk becomes full. Repeat until you have all your pictures downloaded and stored elsewhere that is not Apple. When your disk fills up, or before it fills up), you can delete the offending MMCS files from that folder until you transferred all your pictures and videos into a different cloud server.

I am downloading my pictures so that I not have problems with iCloud. I already have backed up what I have, most of them, into an external drive. I furthermore backed up that external drive (that is now my main picture and music drive) into a dedicated backup drive. I believe there should always be a prime set and a backup set on different drives - So I don’t depend on Apple. I am thinking I may use a separate photograph cloud service to backup my pictures for a second time - and get a way from Apple’s iCloud altogether.

Best of success.

same issue here. I Turned on icloud photo backup on my PC windows 10, and boom within hours all my HD drive space was gone.

Deleting the files just results in it filling up all over again. Have not been able to find a solution other then just turning off photo backup to PC, which kinda defeats the purpose. Cant believe this long and apple has no responded.

Supergrovertje wrote:

How do I accomplish this?

I used this command:

mklink /J "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Apple Inc\CloudKit\iCloud Photos\MMCS" "D:\iCloudPhotoLibraryTest"

"

... and that create the junction. BUT... when I reset my PC, the Windows iCloud App removes this junction and simply creates the MMCS folder again and starts to fill it up with all these temp cache files once again.

How can I create a junction that does not get deleted by this nagging iCloud for Windows app?

I discovered that when I disable iCPL via the iCloud for Windows app and then delete the MMCS folder and then re-enable iCPL via the iCloud for Windows app, that this app/service then creates the MMCS folder again immediately.

So, instead of me creating a junction for the MMCS folder (that gets deleted anyway on a PC restart), I decided to create a junction for the [iCloud Photos] parent folder. Inside this folder is the MMCS folder located.

And this worked. Now when I switch of/on the iCPL in the iCloud for Win app, this [iCloud Photos] folder junction is not affected. Also it survices a PC reset! So the junction is active and stays put, but... I can't use it!

If I press [Photo and video download]-button on the iCloud-foto's quicklink in Win Explorer, it gives me the message that my Photolibrary is being prepared. But... it keeps giving me this message... so downloading my pics and vids from iCloud to my PC locally is STILL not possible this way!

What a frustrating service Apple has created for Windows users! Extremely userunfriendly... something not to be expected of a brand like Apple. 😠

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?