SO slow to upload photos to shared album

That cannot be the whole story though. On my end, I am using iCloud to store my photos. So all the photos are already in the cloud, but it still takes forever for content to be added to a Shared Album.

The reduction is size for the shared albums it not that dramatic. It should suffice for a slideshow on a TV, but I would not use it to transfer photos for archiving:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786

When shared, photos taken with standard point-and-shoot cameras, SLR cameras, or iOS devices have up to 2048 pixels on the long edge. Panoramic photos can be up to 5400 pixels wide.

If you have broadband wireless or cable -- the upload speed is way slower than download speed -- that is why they only sing and dance about download speeds. In these markets you are basically a salmon swimming up stream against a very strong current.

Dial up - , FIOS in the home (fiber optics from verizon) and I believe DSL have the same speed both ways. With any setup its a good idea to not be downloading or surfing the net while trying to upload - as you will slow down the transmission from the get go.

altabq wrote:

That cannot be the whole story though. On my end, I am using iCloud to store my photos. So all the photos are already in the cloud, but it still takes forever for content to be added to a Shared Album.

even if they are in the cloud - or two servers are standing next to each other - it may still have to send the information down through your mac and then back up again Possibly because of synchronization - Icloud is not really a true backup - it allows you to synchronize content through multiple devices.

That cannot be the whole story though. On my end, I am using iCloud to store my photos. So all the photos are already in the cloud, but it still takes forever for content to be added to a Shared Album.

Shared albums are using a different iCloud service than iCloud Photo Library, as shared albums do not count against your iCloud storage. And shared albums are storing the photos at a reduced resolution, so the photos you add to shared albums need to be converted.

Thanks for the additional info, I wasn't aware of this.

The conversion does make sense, I guess, since it's a service that's essentially free. I would have mainly expected it to be servers-sided when using iCloud photo storage because it should be more efficient that way.

I was actually planning to use the service so that my SO could add photos to an album as well, and we could then put a slideshow of the album on the apple tv. But given that I use iCloud Photos with optimized storage, and that the image conversion is client-side, the Photos app must first download the full resolution image, convert it, and then upload a reduced resolution photo to the shared album. And then my Apple TV has to download it again. That's a lot of bandwidth for a task that Apple's/Amazon's servers probably perform in a fraction of the time that my MBP 2011 takes.

But anyways, I think I'll switch to normal albums now to get full res images on the tv.

This has really nothing to do with internet connection speeds, I'm connected on a 30 gig connection, and if I share even just 1 photo to a shared library, I don't see it until the next day. There's something definitely not right.

This is definitely a problem at Apple server side. Even with 20 MBit/sec (tested!) upload speed it sometimes takes several days to upload just a handful of jpegs.

Inacceptable, to say the least. I can only recommend to switch to dropbox or google services. As it looks, apple engineering is severely struggling with either cloud capacity management or their is some bug in their software as to improperly set timeouts (means if something inexpected happens they just wait way too long before they either issue an error message or step over the problem).

The second type of problem I had noticed with Apple music where it just hang for ages if I tried to upload something they could not handle (too low bitrate). And this one is definitely reproducible. In the music case, however, there is at least an error message. With photos, I am just waiting for some days until finally my photos (added to the Photos app on my Mac) would show up on my iPad.

Wonder if they notice that in their monitoring and, if yes, what they are willing to do here as it appears that this problem already persists for at least half a year.

This may be the final straw that sends me (and my family) into the arms of Google's services.

Because it is internet based - remember patience is a virtue

LN

Yes, I am having the same problem. Created a shared album, added one photo, two days later still no sign of it. Apple really needs to rethink how they work this...

Same problem here and nothing to do with internet connection. If I upload from my iPhone is decently fast, from Photos on my Macbook Air takes forever! Same Wi-fi.