Without reading this whole thread, I’m worried that I’m reading “when she deletes a photo on her phone it will still be on iCloud” - this is not true!
When the photo library on iPhone is synced with iCloud, Apple algorithms will decide which photos are on the phone. Tiny thumbnails are kept on the phone and if you want to see one, it gets downloaded. At the same time, others already downloaded will be deleted back to thumbnail only.
Your friend will not be the one doing this. If on the other hand your friend does actually delete a photo on the phone it will be deleted everywhere.
On the question of using a library manager to split up a library, this is one thing I regret doing and would not recommend. Even if you try to do it cleanly on year boundaries you may still have issues with New Year parties, changing timezones and old photos that were scanned at a different time than when they were taken.
When I got started with the iCloud photo library, the upload process killed the internet for everyone in the house. I had to research this and discovered the little known issue of Buffer Bloat.
This was caused by the combination of router and ISP that I had at the time. Basically the uploads to iCloud were pouring into a buffer that was expanding like a balloon and not letting any other traffic through. The solution was to get Apple’s Xcode Network Link Conditioner app and use it to limit my machine to use no more than 80% of the available bandwidth at any time. This allowed other household computers and mobile devices to use the other 20%.
This does sound unbelievable, but it was due to the router and ISP. If there is one thing Apple consistently get wrong, it’s believing everyone has a superior always-on internet connection. We don’t.
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Hi Barry,
The problem is that nothing’s moving.
Another tech-friend set her up at Thanksgiving for her phone to back up to iCloud w/ photos (learned this today).
About 500 photos did upload between Thanksgiving and now.
Another 6,000 or more haven’t uploaded – not sure if that’s lack of logging onto their wifi or if it’s just not going to happen – I didn’t see “paused” or anything. My testing this for myself was on my MBP; so I don’t know if the phone-only experience is different.
We logged into her iCloud account from her work-PC to have no confusion about what photos we were looking at (no confusion on their part) and what got uploaded is small.
The “Thanksgiving friend” (who does good tech-work) did a drag-and-drop from her phone to an ext. hard drive. I wasn’t around to see how he did this (he’s an Android user). … Looks like special apple-named folders; but the photos are all there (minus anything done between T-giving and now and those photos all seem to be in the cloud).
Her Macbook pro wasn’t booting (she rarely uses it). … I’ve got that charging overnight and will back her up her whole phone again and see if we get all the photos.
If we do, I’m doing to recommend we upload that photo set to the cloud and, when it’s up, we go to the Apple store (she’ll pick the cell phone store instead, because there is no line; but I’ll try for an Apple store).
I do want to sit with pros. as the family has two “main” Apple IDs and she seems to have one ID set up on her phone for photos and the other for apps. I didn’t know one could do this!
We’ll see how it goes with the techs. I want to get them unified under family sharing and get the iPads, etc. their kids use locked down a bit.
One good thing that came of this is showing her how it’s possible to get to all the photos from ANY computer w/ the ability to log into the cloud convinced her it’s time to consolidate and she loved that feature.
Slowly converting my friends into having multiple back-ups, one chunk at a time (in theory the phone is backed up; next we work on the computers!).
I was (and am still) a little worried that she or one of her kids will delete a photo in the photo manager that they’d not want to lose.
Rose suggested the parental controls could help prevent this (on the kid/tablet side). I’ll see about a “belt-and-suspenders” approach on the rest of the photos so things aren’t accidentally lost.
Thank you for the uploading cautions, etc. … I thought about setting up a photos library on an ext. hard drive for her; but that’s too “fiddly” for her. I’m going to keep working with them a little bit at a time!
Thanks again!!
I am bothered that this is taking so long to set right. There’s always something (tonight I learned about the MBP not booting and the personal; yet work-dedicated Windows laptop being nearly maxxed out for hard drive space. … Getting that fixed, prob. via tech, so I don’t “own” that process. … I do it myself all the time on Macs and have Windows software somewhere, but sometimes it’s better to not be the guy who moved things.
I’ve been thinking about a similar issue myself. I’ve been using Google Photos casually for years and it’s a nice app. Easy to use.
I trust Google enough to give them my photos. I’m not aware of an incident where they did what they said they would not do.
However, I’m reluctant to commit to Google Photos because of Google’s track record killing services. Buzz, Wave, Reader and now Google Plus. If Google will kill G+, nothing but search advertising is safe.
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I have been using Google Voice for years as a voicemail system. Have never changed my business cards to “Call this number” (my G-Voice number) for the very same reason. When will they abandon this “side project?”
Oh, it’s a lot more than that!
That said, photos is one area that major companies have an intense interest in remaining relevant to consumers. It’s not only a particularly ‘sticky’ category, but Google is gaining upgrades in the form of paid Google Drive subscriptions as photo file sizes increase past its 16MB limit for free, unlimited saves. More, the main value Google currently derives from GP is the metadata and raw image info it can feed into its learning systems, which undergirds everything from its mapping, to travel data, to new AI-based photography features. I don’t think anything is happening any time soon to GP, just as nothing ended up happening to Picasa’s web albums … which got folded transparently into GP.
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I’m struggling with this on my overall app picks: Future-proof, open, feature-rich. You can’t have all three.
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Quick update.
We wore out three Apple techs, one manager and me, at an Apple store recently.
Overall it was a really good experience, it just took four hours.
Ensured things were backed up, phone swapped out and downloads done, Apple ID reset (had an out-of-business email address) and family sharing set up on new phone, etc.
The manager said, “Well, you’ve done all the hard stuff, the rest is easy.” … True.
I’m probably invited over to dinner soon to help set up the devices for her kids.
“Amazingly,” we each identified the same child who would be likely to hack his brother and sister to get more screen time! (The youngest.) So, she agreed to not let the kids know one another’s passwords.
Who is taking odds that the youngest (7) social engineers at least one sibling?
Thanks to all who gave advice on this thread! … I’m still looking through it for additional ideas(!).
–Tim