Archive

Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

I have no idea what iCloud Photo Library is Doing

July 3rd, 2015 No comments

This post is my current stream-of-conciousness on iCloud Photo Library as part of the new Photos App in OS X Yosemite. Please excuse grammar/spelling errors. May contain cursing and words not appropriate for those who don’t like bad words

<rant>

I have no FUCKING idea what in the hell is going on with my iCloud Photo Library, and I hate it.

A few days ago I expanded my iCloud storage space from the measly 20GB I had been paying for before (at a wonderful DISCOUNTED rate of $10.99 a year, instead of the current rate of $2/month… magical) to 200GB. This was due to it being completely full of my device backups. Could I have cleared some? Sure, but the iOS 9 beta seemed to make all my devices ‘new backups’ and I was feeling lazy and I didn’t want my email to run out of space (yay iTools/MobileMe/iCloud email and your backup data being the same storage amount). So I got 200GB. I figured, since I have this space, I may as well use this iCloud Photo Library thing everyone has been talking about. I have a decent number of photos over the years, and I’d like to have them backed up somewhere. I pay for Crashplan, so I technically have the photos backed up that way, but in iCloud it promised to be much more accessible. Yay!

So I enable it, it seems to backup the pictures in my existing iPhoto library, which are mostly images from my iCloud Photo Stream anyway. This works fine, I think, as far as I can tell. Then I get into the fun part!

Over the years I’ve had a variety of computers, and I’ve backed up those computers in different ways. From manually dragging and dropping user folders to external hard drives, to Time Machine, to now Crashplan etc. I’ve also had a variety of iPhoto, Lightroom and Aperture Libraries over the years, from my phone photos to ones taken with different Canon DSLRs. Safe to say it’s a bit of a mess. My plan was to simply grab the folder of originals from each and import them into the new iCloud Photo Library. I didn’t care about my metadata, I didn’t want the images moved, and I figured this would be the easiest process. I thought Photos.app would be able to remove any duplicates based on exif data.

So I did these transfers, from around 5 or 6 different folders from my Mac Mini and let it finish. I did a couple of other folders from my Macbook Pro today. I was warned about duplicates, as expected, to which I answered “Do Not Import” and “Apply to All”.

  • I have some photos repeated 4 times, some twice.
  • I have some photos missing.
  • I can’t search for some photos by date, but they appear when I scroll around and find them.
  • I have no idea what photos are in my library.

I still have some collections of RAW files from Lightroom that I’m holding off until I can figure out what’s going on. As far as I can see Photos.app has no way to detect duplicates. I don’t know why search won’t work so I can’t easily establish what photos are missing. And on top of that any operation like an import or while it’s uploading totally thrashes both of my computers to make them almost unusable.

</rant>

Ugh do I have to use Google Photos?

Categories: Rants, Thoughts Tags: