After holding off of iCloud Photos for a long time, I decided a few months ago to finally make the jump, mainly due to two factors. On the one hand, the changes to Photos in iOS 13 were compelling. Additionally, at that time, I was on the 200GB plan which was starting to get just a bit too small for my document storage needs. So I upgraded to the 2TB plan which then basically gave me iCloud photos ‘for free’. Shortly after, I made an additional backup of my library and then checked the box to activate iCloud Photos on my MacBook Pro where all of my photos were stored. That’s were a month-long journey started…
Once the upload was finished after a couple of days, it told me that about 1600 of my 40,000 photos could not be uploaded to iCloud. At that point, I was not very concerned and tried some general troubleshooting (eg. restarting photos.app, restarting the Mac, giving it some additional time while plugged into power). However, nothing changed. So I decided to deactivate iCloud Photos on the Mac, went into the iCloud preferences and deleted all my pictures from iCloud. As a safety measure, iCloud deletes pictures after 30 days, so I had to wait.
After the 30 days, I tried it again. Unfortunately, the result was the same - still about 1600 photos could not be uploaded. I then investigated whether there was a particular picture file format or camera was causing the problem. But the pictures were a mix of HEICs, JPGs and RAWs from different iPhones and cameras. Of course, as I was about to do a serious change in my library, I made another backup. Then I manually exported the pictures as originals out of my library and imported them back in. After importing them again, they were uploaded without any problems. I did cost me some time as I have all my pictures sorted into albums which meant that I had to sort them all again but I was happy that I could finally enable it on my other devices.
To avoid further trouble, I first imported any remaining pictures from my iPhone and iPad to the Mac the old fashioned way via a cable and only activated iCloud Photos after deleting every photo left on the device (and also removed it from the ‘recently deleted’ folder). I also did this one device at a time and waited until Photos was done downloading thumbnails). A couple days later, my Photos were successfully synced to my iPhone, iPad and Mac mini - or so I thought…
I noticed the next day that the count of pictures and videos differed an each device:
Device | No. of all items | No. of photos | No. of videos | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
Mac mini | 40,329 | 39,312 | 1,017 | |
MacBook | 40,333 | 39,316 | 1,017 | |
iCloud.com | 40,327 | 39,309 | 1,017 | '1 other element' |
iPad | 40,330 | 39,315 | 1,015 | |
iPhone | 40,331 | 39,316 | 1,015 |
In the process, my MacBook told me that there wasn’t enough space on my disk to keep all originals (which is in itself weird, as I had about 40GB left on my drive and before uploading the pictures, all pictures were solely on the MacBook). Since I didn’t see a smart way to proceed, I called up AppleCare and asked them what to do. The support rep told me to deactivate and then reactivate iCloud Photos on each of my devices. I specifically asked him whether that could result in data loss. He told me it was not possible because the pictures that were uploaded would still be in iCloud and every picture that hadn’t been uploaded would remain on device.
When I tried this solution on my iPhone, it told me it would only delete about 26,000 photos (bear in mind that the iPhone was empty before I activated iCloud Photos). I proceeded nevertheless and deleted the remaining 14,000 photos manually. At this point I was fine with loosing a small amount of possibly not uploaded photos if that meant I would get the same count on each device. After reactivating iCloud Photos on the iPhone, nothing had changed - the numbers still did not add up.
Because this was more or less expected (the support rep told me that it could be any of my devices that was causing the problem and turning iCloud Photos off and on again on all of them would probably solve it), I continued on my iPad. After deactivating it, I experienced more or less the same. About 1,500 photos remained on device as well as all albums. I deleted them manually again, reactivated iCloud Photos and went to sleep.
This morning, when I checked whether everything was available again on the iPad, I noticed that about 95% of my albums were missing. I checked all the other devices and realised they were gone everywhere. I suspect what was happening was that in the background, iCloud Photos was not really deactivated, so deleting the albums manually caused them to be deleted everywhere as well.
So, I went and got my backup library from before I solved the problem of pictures not being uploaded and tried to open it. I was greeted by a lovely error message that some pictures in my library were not available locally in the library but only in iCloud. Therefore I was supposed to make this library my main library and then let iCloud download them. But doing so would of course sync changes and delete the albums. (As a side note: At the time of the backup, the library was set to keep originals…).
Okay, no problem, I still had the backup from July before I started the iCloud Photos journey. So I can just restore that one, stay away from iCloud and everything will be fine, right? Well, Photos opened the library (which was still on an external drive) and started to update it (not an iCloud update but the occasional library update) but even after about 15 minutes, it still remained on 0%.
That was when I started to have a bad feeling about this. I had one broken backup and one that was stuck in an update-process. Because this whole process went over months, my TimeMachine backups did not reach far enough back to get a problem-free version from my MacBook. So, I went to my last chance and got my offsite backup (created with Carbon Copy Cloner), booted from it, turned off Wifi immediately and - luckily - the library opened. Unfortunately, I could not copy the library anywhere because it also told me that some pictures in my library were not available locally in the library but only in iCloud. But since the library was opened, I could at least go through all of my albums and take screenshots of them. That way, I am at least able to recreate the albums for about 20 years of photos… I guess, there’s another big project I can add to my task manager…
So, the moral of this story: Even a lot of backups and caution cannot prevent crisis sometimes. My photos are more or less safe but still, this is bad. After years of having no problem at all with iCloud Drive and iCloud sync (I’ve been using document syncing over iCloud in its various states since about 2012), I now understand the occasional criticism of Apple‘s service quality.
A side note:
Having gone through this, I find it baffling that there is no restore functionality for iCloud Photos as there is for documents stored in iCloud.
Some additional info:
Whenever I mention ‘pictures’, I actually mean pictures and videos. For better readability, I chose keep it simpler. (One exception is the table above, where I detailed both pictures and videos)
My iOS (iPhone X, iPad Pro 11“) devices are running 13.1.2 - the latest public version at the time of writing.
My Macs (15“ MBP 2016, Mac mini 2012) are running 10.14.6 (Mohave).