iCloud Photo Library Re-Uploading

Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:

However, there’s a nasty side effect of turning iCloud off and back on: iCloud Photo Library needs to re-upload all your photos. It does this in order to compare the library’s contents to the synchronization “truth” at iCloud. Fair enough, except that this process can take days, depending on the size of your Photos library and the speed of your Internet connection. Bad Apple! We don’t see that sort of poor performance with Dropbox or Google Drive, and this behavior is both unnecessary and driving people away from iCloud Photo Library. […]

It’s bad enough that Photos wants to upload every photo to iCloud Photo Library again, but here’s the scenario that triggered this article. When I tried to turn iCloud Photo Library on again, I was told that I didn’t have enough space: my 200 GB iCloud storage plan had only 56 GB free, but my Photos library contained 113 GB of photos. All that was true, except for the fact that the reason my iCloud account was so full was because it already held every one of those photos! Every time I clicked Continue to acknowledge that I realized this fact, Photos turned iCloud Photo Library off again.

This is the first of a new column at TidBITS that they’re calling “Bad Apple”, in which they plan to “dive into a particular aspect of something that Apple got wrong”. Dive into being the right term for why this is so good.

iCloud Photo Library is pretty great in most regards — but it’s not good enough. But the ways it’s not good enough are often complicated and take time to describe, which is exactly what Engst has done here.

★ Friday, 26 January 2018