My wife has been dutifully downloading her photos from her iphone to her 2009 MBP running El Cap. (This MBP backs up to TM and CCC. So, the pics have been relatively safe.)
I recently subscribed to and shared 2TB icloud with my family.
My 36K photo/2.5K video library has uploaded and is viewable on my devices.
My library is also saved on my M1 MBP.
The challenge:
How do I get the Photos library on her old MBP synced to iCloud?
Her icloud library however only consists of about 5k photos as opposed to the 25K or so on her MBP. I have checked the icloud settings on her MBP and “Photos Agent” - the only reference to Photos at all - is selected, but regardless of the number of times I’ve rebooted, logged in, etc., the pics in Photos have not uploaded to icloud.
“Just get her a new Mac!” is not the answer here. I’m confident there is a way to sync all the pics across her devices; I just haven’t figured it out yet. Or I’m missing some glaringly obvious setting/procedure. So short of a Migration Assistant solution (which would require a new Mac), what clever, MPU-level way is there to get those pics synced?
What has been happening to the photo’s on your wife’s iPhone? Are they getting synced to iCloud? Or does she delete them after transferring them to her Mac? Or does she have iCloud Photo’s turned off on her phone? I ask because if she already has the photos synced to iCloud through her phone, then there is no need to sync them again.
When she transfers photo’s to her Mac, how does that happen; or more specifically is she saving them to the Photos app or somewhere else?
Have you shared your photo library with your wife? If so, do your shared photos appear for her? Do any of her shared photos appear for you?
Note that it is possible that you have done everything correct and you just need to wait for your wife’s Mac to actually sync the photos. The frustrating thing is that Apple gives you no control over this. You just need to trust that the software knows when to do a sync and hope that it gets it right. Sometimes this means leaving it overnight. Other times it means waiting weeks, other times it seems to get stuck on one problem file and provides no useful feedback (users have reported guessing correctly which file was the issue and upon deleting it sync resumes). Apple provides no way to get the status of the sync or to control it.
El Capitan supported iCloud Photos when it was announced, but I wonder if they’ve changed the requirement in the intervening years.
You could setup a second user on your computer and ask your wife to login, before adding the photos to the library on her account and see if they upload to iCloud from there. Then see if you can simply attach from the El Cap computer
One thing to note here is that “iCloud Photos” has changed quite a lot over the years. My ancient 2012 Mac mini cannot access iCloud Photos that are in the “Shared” family album, for example. And I’m not even sure it is even downloading the regular photos I take with my iPhone.
Pics on the phone since getting icloud sync from her phone. In addition, she has been uploading them to her MBP, as always.
I’m tending more towards your last points - like it may sync, after a while, or not at all, and no indication if or when. Seems like never though, since it hasn’t synced yet and it’s been over a month.
Now that’s an MPU solution. A workaround, for sure, but a solution nonetheless. If I can’t figure out a way to do it from the '09, then Xferring to a new account on my '21 will have to do.
I wonder if she copies it to an external drive, then we set up her account on my computer and refer to the same external drive…
Create a Shared Library between yourself and your wife.
Add the common pictures from your acccount to the shared library.
Add her pictures from her account to the shared library.
Import her pictures in your iCloud Library and upload to the shared library. Mac has a imported section which can be used.
*** Correction: Shared Libraries do not compress photo files. I mistakenly confused Shared Libraries with iCloud shared albums. See posts by @geoffaire and @vikrantsingh_au. ***
Be careful with Shared Libraries. These are treated differently from your regular iCloud Photos
Library. It is my understanding that photos in Shared Libraries are compressed, not full resolution, and certain types of photos or features are not allowed. The number of photos in a shared library is limited - I think to 5,000 - but these don’t count against your iCloud storage.
My recommendation is to used shared libraries as a convenience for sharing, not as a backup or archive. Your photo backups or archives should be from each individual’s Photos Library.
This appears to be similar to the now-discontinued Photostream feature. It looked like a real convenience to upload photos without the full iCloud Photos treatment, but I had a negative experience on an overseas trip when some of my photos were compressed and lost image quality due to Photostream.
I’m apprehensive of the shared library idea too. Seems like an unnecessary opportunity for another issue to pop up. Ideally, the fewer links in this chain, the better. My first choice would to upload them from the old MBP. If I can’t figure out a way, I will try creating a user account on my MBP with my wife’s Apple ID, then use an external drive with a copy of her Photos library. Just spitballing here, but another method might be to export all of her photos with original info, then add those via new user on my MBP.
If you copy your wife’s Apple Photos library to an external drive, you can connect it to your MBP logged in as your wife and double click the library on the external which will open the library in Photos. From here you’d need to set it as the System library and set it to upload.
If it still won’t work from your wife’s computer, then it would look like your only option (Assuming you’re not interesting in trying something like Google Photos) would be to upgrade her.