iCloud drive file with cloud icon with line through it

Question

Level 1

75 points

iCloud drive file with cloud icon with line through it

My Photos library has gotten kinda unwieldy, so my plan is to duplicate the library, calling the one the archive with all the photos and make the orginial the system photo library and delete many of my older photos. Those photos will of course be backed up through the iCloud photo library and remain visible to all my iOS devices. The archive library will remain accessible when I open Photos holding down the option key, but will not be backed up. So I thought, since I have plenty of space on my icloud drive, I would copy and paste a copy there from the Finder, in addition to saving a copy on my computer at work. The file is about 7GB, well under the 15GB file size limit for iCloud drive. Problem is the file has a cloud symbol with a line through it. Does this mean I can't save a copy to my icloud drive?

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Nov 30, 2016 5:33 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Nov 30, 2016 7:46 PM in response to john slavin1

It means you can't do it the way you are trying to do it. You cannot move a file that is larger than 15GB to iCloud Drive. So, to move a smaller group of photos to iCloud Drive from your Photos Library you can either select fewer from your Finder list, or open Photos, select the photos you want to put in iCloud Drive, press the Command key and then drag them to iCloud Drive from there.

Here is a list of the iCloud Drive symbols and what they mean:

iCloud Drive Symbols

A cloud by itself just means that the item is only in iCloud, so if you were to disconnect from Wifi and go to your iCloud Drive folder, you would not be able to open any items with a plain cloud next to them

A cloud with a down arrow, means it it in the process of downloading to your local drive

A cloud with several slashes across it means that it is trying to connect to the iCloud server

A cloud with a lightning bolt means that you are currently disconnected from the iCloud server

A cloud with a single slash appears to mean that the item is ineligible and cannot be added to iCloud Drive because it does not meet one of the criteria for iCloud Drive files:

What types of files can I store in iCloud Drive?

You can store any type of file in iCloud Drive, as long as it's less than 15GB in size and you don't exceed your iCloud storage limit. There's no restriction on file type, so you can keep all of your work documents, school projects, presentations, and more up to date across all of your devices. Learn more about managing your iCloud storage.

Cheers,

GB

Reply

Answer 2

Dec 1, 2016 2:22 PM in response to john slavin1

Well, the Photo Library contains a lot more than photos, so if you are getting that symbol, it's not liking something about the file. I'm guessing it is because it is a Library, not a file per se.

It is quite easy to open Photos, select the photos you want on iCloud Drive, and then press the Command key and drag them to iCloud Drive in the Finder.

And sorry I overlooked your original statement about being under the 15GB limit....

Cheers,

GB

Reply

Answer 3

Dec 2, 2016 8:38 PM in response to john slavin1

Right, you cannot move the "Library", but you can move the photos by selecting them within iPhoto and dragging them to iCloud Drive. Don't know if that helps, but wanted to make sure you were clear on that.

Cheers,

GB

Reply

Answer 4

john slavin1 Author

Level 1

75 points

Dec 1, 2016 2:35 PM in response to Eric Root

Because Photos will only sync the "System" Photo Library to your iCloud photo library. If you have more than one photo library on your mac, only one is the System Photo Library. The other one, or all the others, depending on how many libraries your have, don't get synced to iCloud. That's the whole point of this exercise. I want to have one big library of older photos for my daughter, and a relatively smaller one of her more recent stuff. The recent stuff gets synced back and forth to her small 16 GB iPhone through the icloud photo library. The bigger one doesn't. But it still needs to be backed up somewhere, which is the whole point of my question.

John

Reply

Answer 5

john slavin1 Author

Level 1

75 points

Dec 2, 2016 12:34 PM in response to john slavin1

Well, I have my answer, which I'm going to post here in case anyone else runs into this. The answer comes from support at FatCat Software, developer of PhotoPhotos:

"Unfortunately, it's not possible to upload a Photos library to iCloud Drive - it's specifically disallowed by Apple. This is primarily because the structure of the library on disk is such that it's not really safe to sync across multiple machines via a pure file based syncing solution like iCloud Drive (or Dropbox, for that matter). Keeping everything in order requires additional "smarts", which is what iCloud Photo Library provides.

If you want a file based backup solution for the photo library (and everything else on the computer), I would personally recommend Backblaze, which is $5/month, but allows backing up an unlimited amount of data. The other straightforward solution is to just pick up an external drive and set up Time Machine to back up the whole Mac to that (I do both, myself)."

Cheers.

John

Reply