Photos – you do it wrong Apple. In 2015

There were two reasons to why I don't use iCloud Drive for photo backups:

- iCloud Drive doesn't support selective sync. 50 GB photos? 50 GB consumed everywhere.

- Apple is for some reasons so weird when it comes to workflows in general. I don't know, some love iTunes for music management but I never really got along with them. The problem is that you're always S.O.L. if you don't think as different as them.

Nowadays I use Dropbox, who conveniently enough revised their account pricing due to added competition, as my photo archive. And I can store whatever damn photo formats I wish. Fujifilm RAW's (.RAF) included. :p As well as (perhaps at least as important) -- formats from future camera purchases I haven't thought of yet.

Very much agreed. I am also a paying member of their 200GB plan so I can store my 25GB of Photos. They magically consume 25GB on my SSD but blow up to 60GB in the new Photos app. Why - I don't know. Sync between my iPhone, iPad and Mac basically doesn't work. Several new pictures show up as double or triple files, which I then have to manually delete. Also deletion does not sync. Deleting on one device does not delete on other devices (as is intended). A least for me. Will cancel and go back to Onedrive sync. Sad.

"I'm a developer so I know what I'm talking about which means that Apple must be wrong!"

The technical changes of bringing a service like iCloud photos must be massive when compared to projects that most of us here work on. Millions (billions?) of users, petabytes(?) of images, support for Desktop and Mobile and Web, and launched worldwide? Seems to me like they've done a pretty great job handling this!

I'm a long time user of Aperture and have built up ~200GB of RAW Photos, and there's no way I trust icloud photos to handle this without corrupting things with no backup in place that I can control (Sync != Backup). So for now, I've only setup iCloud photos to work with my iPhone photos (~6Gb, which so far, has worked excellently. I haven't had any sync issues, in fact sync has been pretty quick for uploads/edits/deletions/meta.

Of cause, this doesn't mean that issues will become apparent with larger 100GB+ libraries.

Personally, Photos is missing power features that aperture had and i used extensively, but the promise of a synced photos library across all my devices, previews and metadata, as a system level service for 3rd party integration is the icing on the cake.

I've resorted to sharing photos with family by uploading them to a 200GB EBS volume and automatically generating simple HTML pages that look like this:

    <html>
      <head>
      <title>My album name</title>
      </head>
      <body>
        <h1>My album name</h1>
        <img src="/photos/2015/04/IMG_3895.JPG" />
        <p>A caption!</p>
        <img src="/photos/2015/04/IMG_3899.JPG" />
        <video src="/videos/2015/04/IMG_3904.MOV" controls />
        ...
      </body>
    </html>
   

It literally took me a week's worth of evenings to scrap it together, and everyone in my extended family seems to like it. It's fast, simple, and I'm much closer to "owning" all my photos (the only intermediary is AWS).

I feel fortunate that I know how to do that, seeing what's available to the "average consumer." It's kind of sad. I have yet to find a photo sharing product that is not expensive, bloated, and buggy.

Sounds like the service should have been backup-only, not a pseudo Dropbox-like service. The problem here is the expectation and the reality.

For example, I use Backblaze for backup, and backup-only. With that service, I almost expect it to "take its time" while it loads my files in the web interface. It's backup!

But with Dropbox, I want to see my file listing instantly and go through a carousel instantly. But dropbox is not a "photo-only" service and so I give it leeway as well. And the fact that I can specifically choose what folders to sync and what folders not is perfect for my resource-strapped laptop.

However, with this service, the expectation comes with computer-like responsiveness and speed. If I had 200gb of photos on my computer, I'd expect it accessible instantly. And sharing to work similarly to either network sharing (mark folders as shared and specify access restrictions) or dropbox (users co-own folders with a main owner). It seems strange that you can't share a read-only access to your friends/family. Or to share read/write access.

I think that if this service was a startup, people wouldn't give it so much shit about the issues. It's startup, these things will get ironed out. But when Apple comes out, they boast about their services so much that you expect them perfect on the first try. This is not a "beta" or "alpha", it's a full product from a huge company. And it's fundamentally broken.

Especially if you can use the web interface to upload "jpeg-only". Wtf is that about?

Honestly, most of these complaints just seem like bugs. I've heard a number of people complaining about speed / CPU usage problems. Genuine problem, but presumably not a design flaw. Frankly, iCloud Photos is so much better than the previous photo solutions on iOS that slight troubles at the start can be overlooked. Now let's just hope Apple fixes these problems soon. If they don't, that will be the real problem.

Coming from iPhoto I have manually organized my photos into albums.

With the new Photos app this is now broken. There is no way that I can tell if a photo has been added to an album or not. Some might be added to several albums (I do not want that), I simply can't find that out.

What you need is ownCloud