I'm done with iCloud Photo Library
512pixels.net
512pixels.net
I have no idea what the "rules" are. For example, I bought iCloud storage plan for 200 GB for $4/month, and I'm not sure what that is backing up. Is it just backing up a single version of my phone? Or multiple, in case I accidentally delete something? I'm thinking it's the former, which is only barely useful.
I also do a lot of Photostreaming with my family. Photostream is a great product. I already have 4 separate photostreams with thousands of pictures and videos, but I'm apparently paying nothing for it. Why? What's the limit? How can I get a copy of an entire photostream? Can they arbitrarily delete all my photostreams? All of these I'm unsure about.
The same goes for Photo Library and iCloud Drive. I have no idea how it works, what the limits are, but I'm too afraid to try it because of the things that OP says. It may delete my entire photo library, and I can't afford that because I have years upon years of photos on my iPhone of my family that I can't lose.
I wish the explanations were better, and their guarantees were stronger. As I said, it feels like their entire offering is a mess, which is too bad, because it shouldn't be this confusing and bad for all of their success.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299
I don't know if that answers your questions or not. It does seem kind of complicated.
As I said, the entire thing is way too complicated.
What you want is regular shared albums.
The upload limits are to do with the number of images you can upload per hour/day/month - they're about the amount of uploaded items not stored items.
That said, I have multiple photostreams with almost 1000 photos/videos per photostream, and none have been deleted. So I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, if it is just a sync mechanism. As well, I do know that without an internet connection, the videos don't work, so I'm not sure what "sync" even means in this context.
Literally the second (non-ad) result when I searched on DDG for "apple photostream": https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201317
From that page:
The subheading says: "With My Photo Stream, you can access the recent photos that you take with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, on your Mac and PC."
Under the instructions about setting it up is this:
> My Photo Stream uploads your most recent photos so you can view and import them to all of your devices. Photos are stored in My Photo Stream for 30 days.
I don't know what material you've been reading, but Photostream has always been marketed by Apple as a way to get photos from any of your devices, onto the others. Think of it like a delayed queue. Device A uploads the 5 photos you just took to the photostream. Devices B and C connect later (either because they were off, or had no Wifi, etc) and (depending on your settings) can download those 5 photos. After a month, the photos are automatically deleted from the photo stream.
In the world of iCloud Photo Library, the only reason to keep the "Upload to My Photo Stream" option turned on, is if you have a device that can't use the new Photos app (e.g. older iOS/OSX).
Based on what you're saying about "multiple PhotoStreams" I don't even know what you're doing. Are you sure what you're using is PhotoStreams, and not just regular shared albums? It doesn't sound anything like PhotoStream if you have multiple, long-lived collections.
I've definitely had some issues with their iCloud related Photo systems, but the little messing around I've had to do has been worth it for the functionality when they work, IMO.
It also seems that increasingly, I don't have good answers to those questions because so much of the complexity is hidden (not even accessible by power users or documented online). After months of frustration, I've pretty much decided not to use any of the cloud services on Apple products. I really want to like Apple's cloud services, but I'm not sure any sane person can put up with them on a regular basis.
It makes me wonder, who in Apple is fucking this up so badly? Does no one care, or do they honestly think things are going great? I have to change my computer that I need to sync my iPhone with, and it's going to be very painful. Why? This is 2015. Why doesn't anyone in Apple with their thousands and thousands of highly paid engineers not care, and which VP or PM is responsible for their software offering now being the best it could be? I would love to know.
I have the opposite question for you - why is it painful?
Assuming you have a Mac, you just restore from a Time machine backup with Migration Assistant. A bit of massaging is required getting passwords reset, etc., and your new computer is basically identical to the old one. I just did this a couple of months ago moving my personal Macbook Pro account & apps to my family iMac.
On the other hand, the same applies for any iOS device if you're on iCloud. A few months back, a friend broke their phone badly on a trip, I wiped one of my phones and handed it to them to use. They restored their stuff in a couple of hours, and were productive again. When they returned it, I restored and had my old phone back identical to what it was in a couple of hours. Other than a couple of passwords and the endless series annoying taps when first initializing an iOS phone (this could be much better), there were no problems.
YMMV, but this stuff mostly works for me.
I'll agree iTunes needs work, and I've had some issues with iCloud Photo Library but this "Safari is the new ie6" thing is stupid.
IE6 was never the most energy efficient browser on desktop or mobile devices.
Mail contacts and calendar work well. They can even work with googles services if you like your email provider to read your mail before you do.
Maps is anything but a disaster. Even in Thailand it gets me where I need to go when I don't know the way.
You may have had bad experiences but don't assume that applies to all other users.
"Browsing on mobile devices" didn't functionally exist when IE6 was released (2001). It would be years before 'mobile browsing' would be a usable thing. I loathe IE6 as much as the next non-frontend-dev, but you're asking IE6 to be something that it was impossible to be.
I'm not the one claiming Safari is "the new IE 6". The person I replied to (and many others) make that comparison, I'm just re-focussing the argument.
> "Browsing on mobile devices" didn't functionally exist when IE6 was released (2001).
For the masses? No. For corporate types? Maybe you should look into Windows CE and Pocket Internet Explorer.
The argument that Safari is "the new IE6" is because Apple focus on user-facing features as a priority over developer focused features. They prioritise energy efficiency (and thus battery life) over absolute raw performance.
Microsoft never had that approach with IE6 - the issue with IE6 wasn't that the focus of development was in the "wrong" place by developer opinions, it's that there was no development focus - it stagnated and received no updates.
Apart from being more power efficient, there doesn't seem to be much user or developer focused development in Safari. It seems to be stagnating
And to imply that power efficiency isn't a huge user feature is ridiculous. People routinely report getting several hours less battery life using Chrome vs Safari.
Safari's case as a "new IE6" has been overstated, I think. It's fast and standards-compliant, and it's not lagging that far behind in catching up to the newest tech, as far as I know. And it's not like the other browsers don't have their share of serious issues.
Mail and Calendar are actually great for apps that come bundled with the OS. One shouldn't see it as a failure on Apple's part that people choose third-party alternatives. I'd also argue that they're better than most third-party apps. (I use Fantastical instead of Calendar, but only because it has the awesome system menu dropdown. I use Mail, because Sparrow is no longer available, Airmail is too buggy, and Thunderbird isn't native.)
Photos is a great iPhoto replacement. It's a bad Aperture replacement, and some people have issues with iCloud, but if you don't need Aperture and don't have these iCloud issues (and doubt most people do), then it's fine.
iTunes is the main problem. It's tragically, hilariously bad. It was a decent, not great, app back in the early 2000s, back when iPods were the norm. Now, it's a trainwreck.
Apple's whole 'Each app is it's own file manager' theme is getting really tired.
It's backed up to the cloud with Arq (which is great) and also Backblaze (which I am less sure about, never had to use it).
This is more flexible and monoculture-avoiding than any of the cloud services; using the stock OS file sharing, the Mac Mini that runs my TV mounts a subset of the library (the "2015" folder) read-only, and uses that to run the screensaver so that when the TV is idle (hopefully most of the time) we see a nice recent photos montage.
It's also great when you somehow really need those photos from last July for some reason; just SFTP in from any kind of computer and download the "2014-07" folder.
I would like to have a web UI for it, but not a shitty one, which is all I have been able to find. Building one sounds fun, but nope, I have kids, maybe when I am in my sixties... it's not really a thing that I actually need. But I do like having it.
I keep 500GB or so in Google Photos, and also in iCloud photo library to try those out.
Google Photos is pretty good for a web app, and very fast for a web app, which means it is way to slow and way to shitty for me to use as a main tool of managing my photos.
Photos.app is OK when it works, but it's Apple, so as many people here and the guy whose blog post spawned this whole thread have noted, it has far too many bugs and weird failure modes (many of which would be catastrophic without good backups). Even though I have good backups of the photo files themselves, I am not going to invest time in arranging things in Photos albums when the preponderance of historical experience indicates there is zero chance those albums will be readable/usable in ten (EDIT: okay, maybe 20) years without resorting to e.g. maintaining a VM of ancient OS X...
But I swear, with el Capitan, folders with more than about 500 photos will now beachball for minutes at a time waiting for a click. WTF. this ship is sinking.
Because I'm paranoid, I do back up everything to Backblaze, which I also recommend.
I particularly recommend this technique I worked out for my wife and I to share the same iCloud photos (but not email, contacts, etc.) so that we both see pictures of the kids that we take: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/27648/photo-streams...
The same is true of this business where Apple will erase your phone if you dare connect to an iTunes installation that's not "blessed" even if all you want to use it for is to backup.
What has always bothered me intensely about Apple is how arrogant they are with MY data and MY access to MY data. Who owns it?
Also, the main view in Google photos had infinite scrolling which is an ok technology for streams (Facebook etc.) but very bad for people needing to jump back to specific points. Apple Photos navigation of moments with its three or four different zoom levels is far superior.
That said, I'm sure Google Photos has evolved in two years... I'd like to check back
Advanced users like things to be just-so, and whatever that is often reveals flaws in these services. By taking a polling of the vocal tech community you'd think these services were a horrid mess. I, however, along with millions of others, use these services glitch-free with only temporary service outages.
Is this a good practice? Naturally that depends on who you are. I'm sure it works best for their bottom line.
It's amazing that with their attention to detail on hardware that they just can't get the software right - or even safe. I wonder what their problem is.
For the (subjective) record, I have never had icloud sync work as expected - it always finds a way to eat files.
During the OS X betas, I've had some issues with the underlying daemons that manages iCloud sync (e.g. bird), but that was a developer beta so it doesn't really count, and it still never actually lost data.
I've never had any trouble with iCloud syncing personally, though I haven't used it for a ton of stuff. Photos is definitely the biggest use I've ever had for iCloud and it works flawlessly from day one for me.
The only area I've had some problems lately with are Contacts. I'll update a contact in one space and not see it updated on another device consistently. Not sure why.
I was going to undo it by restoring from a previous backup. So I go into iTunes and decide to backup the phone beforehand in case anything goes wrong. It was only then that I realized that the new backup deletes the older backup and I was SOL.
iCloud is an unintuitive and buggy mess.
That is the best I can remember at least it was a good while back now.
Objects resurrecting themselves are a reasonable tradeoff for some use cases.
I have my Note 4 'phone' setup to wait until I am on a wifi connection and then backup photos and videos to OneDrive, Google Photos, and Dropbox. I delete old photos from Dropbox occasionally to keep under my storage limit. I tend to delete unwanted pictures before I get back on wifi.
All photo file names start with a date and time stamp so everything is organized chronologically. On OneDrive I sometimes add a text description to favorite photos after the time stamp: when I am zipping through a date range occasional descriptions help navigate.
I let Google Photos organize my photos also.
One problem is that I run Timemachine backups on my primary laptop and so I end up getting three copies of everything on my local backups.
Edit: I use selective sync on OneDrive and Dropbox to only keep a month or two of pictures on my laptop. I access old photos from the web interface.
Hugely disappointing. Apple just doesn't seem to be able to figure out how to make reliable cloud services.
iCloud, for me, syncs photos well - I then run Google Photos on my MBP to sync back to Google - but it's a half-assed solution. The best solution would be allowing photo apps to upload in the background without being brought to the foreground on the iPhone, but I don't see Apple doing this.
It's really the only thing I miss from having an Android phone.
This is kinda similar to why I use SuperDuper to image my Mac, instead of trusting Time Machine.
I do love Apple, but there's a few wrinkles sometimes.
(Most common failure mode is to like appear to be working for hours/overnight, then say something helpful like "Unable to restore Time Machine backup").
Backup is the very last thing I would trust Apple to do.
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