Information about/control over downloading in Photos

Question

Level 1

17 points

Information about/control over downloading in Photos

I have a large photo collection (I use iCloud library and have used nearly 600GB so far). I keep the originals on my iMac and we have two laptops (MBA & MBP) and various phones and an iPad all sharing the photo collection.

The photo syncing/sharing broadly works - but Photos provides no information at all about what is happening beyond the simple "Downloading x items" or similar messages.

I've had "Downloading 2 items" for several weeks - and as I have a limited bandwidth internet connection/deal, a lot of the time I turn the downloading off (using firewall software to restrict which apps can use the internet). But I really want to get fully up to date - if these 2 "items" are something I care about - and the problem is I have no idea. Photos is completely opaque. When I have the firewall turned on the amount of data downloaded is huge - I left it on overnight and in the last 12 hours alone the clouds process has consumed 20GB of bandwidth (down) and as I say it's been downloading without clearing these two for weeks (on and off when I've allowed it to use the internet connection).

My iMac and the two laptops both have the same status and all (when allowed) will use huge amounts of bandwidth - without (over the past few weeks) making any progress on having less to download.

What Photos needs is some more detailed status information - maybe if I knew what these two things were I would choose to delete them and not download them anywhere - but there's no information at all, and even when they have downloaded I won't know which items they were.

Can this really be true? Is Photos really this opaque - or am I missing some useful information somewhere that I don't know about?

Is it really the case that Photos keeps users in the dark about uploading/downloading - with no information at all available about which photos/vides are being/are to be uploaded/downloaded - and that there is no ability to control what is going on (to look at what is being uploaded/downloaded so you can choose to delete or allow the upload/download to happen)?

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), Photos 1.3

Posted on Jan 17, 2016 2:09 AM

Reply

Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

197,995 points

Jan 17, 2016 6:30 AM in response to hedgert

Yes, it is meant to be this way.

The purpose of iCloud Photo Library is to keep the photo libraries updated and the same on all devices, so necessarily all photo will upload to iCloud and all edits will update across all devices.

On your Mac you can check, if you imported photos that cannot upload to iCloud Photo Library, because they are in a format that cannot be processed.

Check, if there are any photos that cannot upload to iCloud Photo Library.

You can use a smart album with these constraints:

It will find all items that are having an incompatible format and all referenced photos or videos. Not all image formats can be used with iCloud, and referenced photos can also not be uploaded to iCloud Photo Library.

Reply

Answer 2

hedgert Author

Level 1

17 points

Jan 17, 2016 6:45 AM in response to léonie

Leonie - thank you for taking the time to reply to my post.

You've slightly misunderstood my question.

I know iCloud is supposed to keep photos in sync across devices - that's what I'm paying my subscription for.

My challenge is about what specific downloading is going on (you've given some useful information about photos not uploading but my question relates to 2 items that have been downloading for days and used 20+ GB without noticeable progress).

I take photos on my camera and upload them to the iMac (so they start not the Mac) - so it's not something I've taken with my camera that can possibly downloading. So anything downloading would have to have been taken on one of our iPhones and I'm not aware of anything that would be 20+GB (in fact probably multiples of that given it's downloaded 20GB in the last day or so and has been in this downloading state for weeks).

I'm asking whether there is a way to find out what is downloading - and given that I'm not aware of any huge videos uploaded to any other device that would be 20+GB - so I want to understand what it is and maybe save my bandwidth by deleting it if I can find out what it is and work out I don't want it.

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

197,995 points

Jan 17, 2016 8:29 AM in response to hedgert

My challenge is about what specific downloading is going on (you've given some useful information about photos not uploading but my question relates to 2 items that have been downloading for days and used 20+ GB without noticeable progress).

That is what I meant by "Yes, it is meant to be this way" in answer to your question "Is it really the case that Photos keeps users in the dark about uploading/downloading - with no information at all available about which photos/vides are being/are to be uploaded/downloaded - and that there is no ability to control what is going on (to look at what is being uploaded/downloaded so you can choose to delete or allow the upload/download to happen)?"

This information is really not available at all. Since we are not supposed to to be able to control what will upload, the designer probably did it not think to be important to know, when each individual file will upload. You can only find out, which files cannot be uploaded from your Mac, because of format problems using the smart album I pointed out.

"Downloading x items"

If the message is saying "Items" and not "Photos" or "Videos", you may be having incompatible items on your iPhone. Did you use any third-party camera application or photo editor?Then delete any photo or video from your iPhone, that uses a non-standard video codec or image format, like high resolution tiffs.

I take photos on my camera and upload them to the iMac (so they start not the Mac) - so it's not something I've taken with my camera that can possibly downloading.

If you edit photos on any Mac using photo editing extensions, any photo you edit will download to your other photo libraries as well. Photo editing extensions are creating additional image files that need syncing. And if you import photos from your camera to the iMac, the other Macs will download them to create previews and thumbnails, even if they do not store the originals.

You can see what kind of upload and download is being done in the Console window, but not the names of the image files:

Open the Console.app (it is in Applications > Utilities). The Console will show you, what iCloud is doing.