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Comment by fumblebee | Hacker News Reader

iCloud is a thorn in my side. When it comes to downloading my photos on demand, I've found it to be infuriatingly slow. (The high quality versions of photos are stored on iCloud, and only if I want to view, edit, or send one are they then downloaded).

Meanwhile I can stream a 4k YouTube video just fine.

Either sort it out, or give me more local storage space for a price that isn't exorbitant!

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Not excusing apple's poor drive performance, but just to point out some of the differences.

Youtube has extensive global caching infra, both on the edge of Google's network and offnet within ISPs networks, to make sure videos are served from a location close to the user.

Also most of the videos people are gonna watch will be popular ones. I.e. they may already be filled in the cache. Compared to your icloud files which may only be accessed by you.

Then one could compare the performance of personal videos on Google Photos.

Turn off 'optimise photos' on your device and you wont have to download the hi-res versions

Unfortunately, the issue then is that I'll run out of local storage. Meaning the only option is to spend much more on an iPhone with more storage.

Are there iOS apps that replace Photos with your own remote storage?

Everything you mention is why I just use Dropbox for everything, in addition to another local and offsite backup.

I've had a horrific time with Dropbox and photos. Some photos not backing up, losing permissions to my own folders, etc. I've since just spun up a server and use icloudpd to sync the originals nightly, backed up to B2.

Obviously not a scalable solution for many, but I finally feel good about having access to my photos.

> ... I finally feel good about having access to my photos.

I only realised how much joy I get from being able to access my photos when I wasn't able to anymore. Back in ~2012, I lost several years worth when the hard-disk on my Acer laptop failed and I didn't keep any backups. Devastating. Backing up is something I learned the hard way.

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