Photos – you do it wrong Apple. In 2015

http://blog.krzyzanowskim.com/2015/05/19/photos-you-do-it-wrong-apple-in-2015/

by krzyzanowskim • 11 years ago

26 13 11 years ago

blog.krzyzanowskim.com

jug• 11 years ago

There were two reasons to why I don't use iCloud Drive for photo backups:

- iCloud Drive doesn't support selective sync. 50 GB photos? 50 GB consumed everywhere.

- Apple is for some reasons so weird when it comes to workflows in general. I don't know, some love iTunes for music management but I never really got along with them. The problem is that you're always S.O.L. if you don't think as different as them.

Nowadays I use Dropbox, who conveniently enough revised their account pricing due to added competition, as my photo archive. And I can store whatever damn photo formats I wish. Fujifilm RAW's (.RAF) included. :p As well as (perhaps at least as important) -- formats from future camera purchases I haven't thought of yet.

Angostura• 11 years ago

iCloud Drive doesn't support selective sync. 50 GB photos? 50 GB consumed everywhere.

To be fair, if you tick 'optimise' on the device, you won't get the full 50GB

artursapek• 11 years ago

I've resorted to sharing photos with family by uploading them to a 200GB EBS volume and automatically generating simple HTML pages that look like this:

    <html>
      <head>
      <title>My album name</title>
      </head>
      <body>
        <h1>My album name</h1>
        <img src="/photos/2015/04/IMG_3895.JPG" />
        <p>A caption!</p>
        <img src="/photos/2015/04/IMG_3899.JPG" />
        <video src="/videos/2015/04/IMG_3904.MOV" controls />
        ...
      </body>
    </html>

It literally took me a week's worth of evenings to scrap it together, and everyone in my extended family seems to like it. It's fast, simple, and I'm much closer to "owning" all my photos (the only intermediary is AWS).

I feel fortunate that I know how to do that, seeing what's available to the "average consumer." It's kind of sad. I have yet to find a photo sharing product that is not expensive, bloated, and buggy.

krzyzanowskim• 11 years ago

Building html page by hand require some knowledge that is not available to regular users (as you pointed out). I found Google Drive/Dropbox/... sharing with link pretty decent, very easy to use and easy enough to manage.

antjanus• 11 years ago

Sounds like the service should have been backup-only, not a pseudo Dropbox-like service. The problem here is the expectation and the reality.

For example, I use Backblaze for backup, and backup-only. With that service, I almost expect it to "take its time" while it loads my files in the web interface. It's backup!

But with Dropbox, I want to see my file listing instantly and go through a carousel instantly. But dropbox is not a "photo-only" service and so I give it leeway as well. And the fact that I can specifically choose what folders to sync and what folders not is perfect for my resource-strapped laptop.

However, with this service, the expectation comes with computer-like responsiveness and speed. If I had 200gb of photos on my computer, I'd expect it accessible instantly. And sharing to work similarly to either network sharing (mark folders as shared and specify access restrictions) or dropbox (users co-own folders with a main owner). It seems strange that you can't share a read-only access to your friends/family. Or to share read/write access.

I think that if this service was a startup, people wouldn't give it so much shit about the issues. It's startup, these things will get ironed out. But when Apple comes out, they boast about their services so much that you expect them perfect on the first try. This is not a "beta" or "alpha", it's a full product from a huge company. And it's fundamentally broken.

Especially if you can use the web interface to upload "jpeg-only". Wtf is that about?

ulfw• 11 years ago

Very much agreed. I am also a paying member of their 200GB plan so I can store my 25GB of Photos. They magically consume 25GB on my SSD but blow up to 60GB in the new Photos app. Why - I don't know. Sync between my iPhone, iPad and Mac basically doesn't work. Several new pictures show up as double or triple files, which I then have to manually delete. Also deletion does not sync. Deleting on one device does not delete on other devices (as is intended). A least for me. Will cancel and go back to Onedrive sync. Sad.

maniacalrobot• 11 years ago

"I'm a developer so I know what I'm talking about which means that Apple must be wrong!"

The technical changes of bringing a service like iCloud photos must be massive when compared to projects that most of us here work on. Millions (billions?) of users, petabytes(?) of images, support for Desktop and Mobile and Web, and launched worldwide? Seems to me like they've done a pretty great job handling this!

I'm a long time user of Aperture and have built up ~200GB of RAW Photos, and there's no way I trust icloud photos to handle this without corrupting things with no backup in place that I can control (Sync != Backup). So for now, I've only setup iCloud photos to work with my iPhone photos (~6Gb, which so far, has worked excellently. I haven't had any sync issues, in fact sync has been pretty quick for uploads/edits/deletions/meta.

Of cause, this doesn't mean that issues will become apparent with larger 100GB+ libraries.

Personally, Photos is missing power features that aperture had and i used extensively, but the promise of a synced photos library across all my devices, previews and metadata, as a system level service for 3rd party integration is the icing on the cake.

kaolinite2• 11 years ago

Honestly, most of these complaints just seem like bugs. I've heard a number of people complaining about speed / CPU usage problems. Genuine problem, but presumably not a design flaw. Frankly, iCloud Photos is so much better than the previous photo solutions on iOS that slight troubles at the start can be overlooked. Now let's just hope Apple fixes these problems soon. If they don't, that will be the real problem.

Fastidious• 11 years ago

It is not a bug that you have 200 GB on iCloud, upload all your 30,000+ photos and videos to it, and "optimized" it takes 60-70 GB on your desktop computer, plus your 16 GB iPhone, and 32 GB iPad are completely full.

It might be a bug that while importing your photos to the iCloud library, many fail to import for no apparent reason, and that when you try re-importing again end up with thousands of duplicates.

It might be a bug that all, web, desktop Photos.app, and mobile Photos.app get almost--to fully--unusable with a 120 GB library size.

It is not a bug that there is no selective synchronization, and/or one way synchronization, so I can synchronize photos from my mobile devices to iCloud without pulling down existing photos on iCloud to my mobile device.

I agree Photos.app in all devices, and the iCloud is not really viable unless you are a light user. This guy [1] has similar complains.

[1] https://collantes.us/bits/icloud-mess/

kaolinite2• 11 years ago

It was my understanding that the optimised library changes in size based on your hard drive. So if you have only 10GB of space left, say, your photo library will be reduced drastically. They need to work on this because most people aren't going to want their computer downloading 80GB of photos, but yes, I'd call that a bug.

Failing imports / duplicates is another issue I've heard about. I haven't personally experienced it and don't know how prevalent it is, but I hope they fix it soon. I don't know about library size - I've heard of people with massive libraries using Photos.app without trouble, but perhaps they had a Mac Pro or something.

As for selective synchronisation, I'd say that it won't be needed if they fix the issues (mentioned above) with library size optimisation. The point is: the user shouldn't have to worry about filling up their devices with photos. As soon as they're running low on space, Photos will reduce the library size. Now, that might not be working perfectly at the moment (not sure, works ok for me), but again - I'd call that a bug.

As I said earlier, the main problem here is whether Apple keeps working on this and gets updates out quickly. The worst problem of all would be if we don't see another Photos update until the next version of the OS (well ok, that's only a month or two away, but nevertheless). If Apple iterates quickly and keeps on improving the service, personally I'll be happy.

bni2• 11 years ago

Coming from iPhoto I have manually organized my photos into albums.

With the new Photos app this is now broken. There is no way that I can tell if a photo has been added to an album or not. Some might be added to several albums (I do not want that), I simply can't find that out.

bni2• 11 years ago

Also if I add the same photo to Photos again by mistake, it now sometimes import a duplicate. iPhoto never did that.

btczeus• 11 years ago

What you need is ownCloud

Photos – you do it wrong Apple. In 2015

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