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,