Here’s Why I’m Saying Goodbye to iCloud Library Forever
I don’t like negativity without purpose and useless grumble, but I really have to say this: I hate iCloud Library and I urge you not to use it. I’ll try to briefly tell you why.
When I was trying Yosemite Beta I quickly jumped on board with iCloud Library. I migrated all my Aperture Library to the shiny new Photos app and started uploading. A lot of my photos, unfortunately, were only on PictureLife since they were uploaded there directly by my phone in the last year or two. The process of getting these tons of photos out of PictureLife was incredibly boring and painful, with no easy way to get them all out of there. It took weeks, but I thought hey, it’s worth it, iCloud Library just works and I’ll never have these problems again.
Then Yosemite came out, and transitioning from the beta to the final release fucked up my iCloud Library. It started uploading everything again but it wasn’t a big deal. I thought hey, shame on me, that was a beta and the final thing won’t mess with my library.
I deleted all the photos download by iCloud on my iOS devices, while I didn’t touch my Mac where my full library is. I started uploading everything again, but looking at the Photos app I realized that almost all my albums were gone. Yes, even if I switched off iCloud Library on my iPhone before purging the partially downloaded iCloud Library that was on it, somehow that made all my albums disappear.
I manually re-made most of my albums by opening a backup of my old Aperture Library and matching the same structure in Photos. A PictureLifeish painful job I had to do. But I thought hey… This must be the last problem I have with my 70GB of Photos. I was wrong.
I fixed the albums mess, I kept uploading everything from my Mac and after many weeks the Photos app on my Mac seemed to be happily uploading everything. From the 10.000+ photos I read that there were around 5.000 left to upload. It’s working. Yeah!
Nope.
I found out that there were many missing photos/thumbnails in the Photos app, so I decided to repair my library. I did exactly that, and as soon as Photos launched again, I discovered that iCloud Library was now disabled. DRAMA. When I enabled it again, I thought that it was going going to check what was already uploaded before starting uploading again. Nope. 10.000 photos to upload. There were going to be thousands of duplicates in my Library. I’m fucked.
But the worst was yet to come. A few days ago I just reset my Mac PRAM because my Mac was acting a bit weird. It happens, right? Once again, I opened Photos and iCloud Library was disabled again. AGAIN. At this point I just wanted to throw my Mac out of my window. When I tried to enable it, this is what happened:
Now, as I sadly discovered a few days before, even if I always had the option “Download Originals to this Mac” enabled, a lot of photos on my Mac were the low res versions, with the actual originals on iCloud. Why? Nobody knows. So apparently now I have thousands of originals on my Mac, thousands of originals on iCloud Library, thousands of duplicates between the two and hundreds of photos not even yet uploaded by my iPhone (because if your Mac is still uploading a lot of photos, iOS devices will give it priority).
A huge mess I don’t know how to deal with. The only solution seems to be disabling iCloud Library forever and restore my Aperture backup. Then I’ll need to put all the thousands of photos gathered from fucking PictureLife and other locations on Aperture but I really don’t know how to do that since a lot of that stuff is now on my iCloud Library. Or I can stick with my new Photos Library, trying to find out what’s missing.
How I’ll solve this situation is my problem, what I’m saying is this: unless you have a photo library so small or a wi-fi connection so fast that it takes 1 hour to upload everything on iCloud (or other similar services), don’t use these goddamn things. Clearly it’s too soon to use these things and they will make a mess out of your photos. It’s not worth it. If you really need an online backup/storage solution, go with Dropbox, I’m sure it’s more reliable and Carousel is making a lot of progress. Maybe I’ll give that a try. See? I’m addicted.
