I'm done with iCloud Photo Library

Apple&#x27;s entire iCloud offering is a mess.<p>I have no idea what the &quot;rules&quot; are. For example, I bought iCloud storage plan for 200 GB for $4&#x2F;month, and I&#x27;m not sure what that is backing up. Is it just backing up a single version of my phone? Or multiple, in case I accidentally delete something? I&#x27;m thinking it&#x27;s the former, which is only barely useful.<p>I also do a lot of Photostreaming with my family. Photostream is a great product. I already have 4 separate photostreams with thousands of pictures and videos, but I&#x27;m apparently paying nothing for it. Why? What&#x27;s the limit? How can I get a copy of an entire photostream? Can they arbitrarily delete all my photostreams? All of these I&#x27;m unsure about.<p>The same goes for Photo Library and iCloud Drive. I have no idea how it works, what the limits are, but I&#x27;m too afraid to try it because of the things that OP says. It may delete my entire photo library, and I can&#x27;t afford that because I have years upon years of photos on my iPhone of my family that I can&#x27;t lose.<p>I wish the explanations were better, and their guarantees were stronger. As I said, it feels like their entire offering is a mess, which is too bad, because it shouldn&#x27;t be this confusing and bad for all of their success.

Haven&#x27;t we established pretty firmly that apple software (for OSX and increasingly iOS) is crap? iTunes is a bloated mess, Safari is the new IE6, photos, calendar and Mail are so bad that pretty much everyone recommends Google or Microsoft replacements, Maps is a disaster. They make a great physical product, but more and more, the &quot;it just works&quot; tag line only applies to basic, trivial operations (and evidently, not even then) or as a punchline.

Just started abandoning Photos today too. I have a 1.5TB library, so it never did fit on iCloud Photos. Switched back to plain old file system directories with all the files named uniquely, and it&#x27;s surprisingly refreshing. No beach-balls, no BS prompts about not having enough space on iCloud even though I don&#x27;t use it. Better integrated with the tools I use too (DxO).<p>Apple&#x27;s whole &#x27;Each app is it&#x27;s own file manager&#x27; theme is getting really tired.

I sync 195 GB of photos and videos between 5(!!!) Macs and 2 iPhones. I have had trouble with iCloud in the past, but iCloud Photos has worked flawlessly for me.<p>Because I&#x27;m paranoid, I do back up everything to Backblaze, which I also recommend.<p>I particularly recommend this technique I worked out for my wife and I to share the same iCloud photos (but not email, contacts, etc.) so that we both see pictures of the kids that we take: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;27648&#x2F;photo-streams-from-two-or-more-icloud-accounts-into-same-iphoto-library&#x2F;185991#185991" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;27648&#x2F;photo-streams...</a>

I love iCloud Photo Library. It&#x27;s worked completely flawlessly for me, across 2 OS X machines and one iPhone. And Photos.app is so much better than iPhoto was.

Apple&#x27;s entire iCloud setup and iPhone synchronization has been a hot mess since day one. Early on my wife lost all of her valuable address book contacts and all of her calendar entries for the mere act of taking one of our iPads off the iCloud service. None of the entries had been made on the iPad, in fact, all of them were made on her iPhone, which was never removed from iCloud. Apple&#x27;s shitty software somehow decided the iPad &quot;owned&quot; the data and, once disconnected, it yanked all of it from iCloud, her iPhone and ever device she had synced. Pure crap.<p>The same is true of this business where Apple will erase your phone if you dare connect to an iTunes installation that&#x27;s not &quot;blessed&quot; even if all you want to use it for is to backup.<p>What has always bothered me intensely about Apple is how arrogant they are with MY data and MY access to MY data. Who owns it?

Have you tried Google Photos? It&#x27;s working extremely well for me and I&#x27;m paying some nominal $9.99 to get 1tb of storage and which is more than adequate for my usage as it also replaces Dropbox (using Google Drive) and the tools for automatically backing up from my phone as well as my desktop work quite well.

I think you see a widely disproportionate amount of these reports with Apple&#x27;s services from the tech&#x2F;blogger&#x2F;twitter crowd (same went along with Apple Music). I believe this is because Apple mainly tests in clean environments, and doesn&#x27;t account for permission and process changes incurred by user intervention or application installs.<p>Advanced users like things to be just-so, and whatever that is often reveals flaws in these services. By taking a polling of the vocal tech community you&#x27;d think these services were a horrid mess. I, however, along with millions of others, use these services glitch-free with only temporary service outages.<p>Is this a good practice? Naturally that depends on who you are. I&#x27;m sure it works best for their bottom line.

I&#x27;m not surprised. Apple appears to have shit the bed with most of its cloud offerings whether it&#x27;s Photos or Music.<p>It&#x27;s amazing that with their attention to detail on hardware that they just can&#x27;t get the software right - or even safe. I wonder what their problem is.

I know these kind of discussions generally polarise people, and we end up with a bunch of subjective reports of how it does &#x2F; does not work, but I&#x27;d really be interested to know if <i>anyone</i> has a use case where 1 or more os x machines and 1 or more ios devices have every synced in icloud reliably.<p>For the (subjective) record, I have never had icloud sync work as expected - it always finds a way to eat files.

I had similar issues trying to backup contacts from an iPhone to the iCloud. I turned iCloud on and it prompted me to choose if I wanted to merge my iCloud contacts list and my phone list or if I wanted to delete my phone list and just import the iCloud list. I chose to merge the two. When it was done syncing, I had gone from ~400 contacts to 12 contacts for no apparent reason.<p>I was going to undo it by restoring from a previous backup. So I go into iTunes and decide to backup the phone beforehand in case anything goes wrong. It was only then that I realized that the new backup deletes the older backup and I was SOL.<p>iCloud is an unintuitive and buggy mess.

I&#x27;ve stopped using iCloud Photos for my wife and me after we discovered the undeleted photos issue. Undeleted photos and undeleted photos in messages coming back from the iCloud were very frightening. If I can&#x27;t delete from a cloud service I can&#x27;t trust it. Delete was redefined. I was in denial for a bit actually thinking that no programmer would do that.

I tried it for a week, but stuck with &quot;my system:&quot;<p>I have my Note 4 &#x27;phone&#x27; setup to wait until I am on a wifi connection and then backup photos and videos to OneDrive, Google Photos, and Dropbox. I delete old photos from Dropbox occasionally to keep under my storage limit. I tend to delete unwanted pictures before I get back on wifi.<p>All photo file names start with a date and time stamp so everything is organized chronologically. On OneDrive I sometimes add a text description to favorite photos after the time stamp: when I am zipping through a date range occasional descriptions help navigate.<p>I let Google Photos organize my photos also.<p>One problem is that I run Timemachine backups on my primary laptop and so I end up getting three copies of everything on my local backups.<p>Edit: I use selective sync on OneDrive and Dropbox to only keep a month or two of pictures on my laptop. I access old photos from the web interface.

iCloud Music Library is similarly unreliable. It hasn&#x27;t (so far) corrupted my library, but attempting to download or stream music onto my iPhone <i>often</i> fails. It just hangs up, or stops mid-stream.<p>Hugely disappointing. Apple just doesn&#x27;t seem to be able to figure out how to make reliable cloud services.

To me, the real issue is that no other photo app can get close to iCloud synching. I&#x27;ve tried Dropbox, Google Photos, et al - but none of them can sync reliably - and it&#x27;s not their fault as far as I can see.<p>iCloud, for me, syncs photos well - I then run Google Photos on my MBP to sync back to Google - but it&#x27;s a half-assed solution. The best solution would be allowing photo apps to upload in the background without being brought to the foreground on the iPhone, but I don&#x27;t see Apple doing this.<p>It&#x27;s really the only thing I miss from having an Android phone.

Wow, terrifying.<p>This is kinda similar to why I use SuperDuper to image my Mac, instead of trusting Time Machine.<p>I do love Apple, but there&#x27;s a few wrinkles sometimes.

I would recommend giving a try to Upthere, we are still in Beta but I think you may like some of the features.<p>Here is a prioritized invitation to our Beta program : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upthere.com&#x2F;signup&#x2F;?inviter=6503411334330319390" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upthere.com&#x2F;signup&#x2F;?inviter=6503411334330319390</a>

I&#x27;m giving synching a try after fighting with Google drive both on my phone and on my laptop. The complete lack of a Linux client meant I could never heavily use it anyway. iCloud sounds like it has all the Google drive problems and then some.