iCloud photo Library initial Upload

[crabapplemcn]

I increased my iphoto library to 2 TB and turned on iPhoto library on my mac. But I have over 20k pictures, and it just says updating on the bottom on my photos in the app. Will this just take forever to upload all my pics to the cloud? Is there any secret?

 

[Ratsima]

I did this at the beginning of 2018. I had 45K photos. I live in Thailand, but I'm sure Apple has local servers to handle the upload process. I checked the "Keep Folder Organization" box on the import panel. The initial import took just over a week.

Apparently my file structure was too complex for the Photos application to handle. The import took forever (well, over a week) and the Photos app crashed several times a day. (Fortunately, it didn't have to start over on the import.)

When I finally gave up on iCloud Photo Library it left hundreds of empty folders in Photos on both my iPhone and iPad.

 

[IWT]

I think it was Jake (MacInWin) who reported a similar experience in a long thread posted a few months ago.

Endless patience seemed to be the answer if I recall correctly. Yes, weeks it took.

I'll try to find the Thread and post back unless Jake comes across this thread first.

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

My problem was with face recognition. Very slow. Thread is here : I need a Photos expert, please

and here:
How long does it take to scan for People?

 

[IWT]

Thank you, Jake - as always.

Ian

 

[Rod]

iCloud does a great job of syncing all things Mac such as contacts, mail, calendars, reminders etc, as well as a number of third party data bases but when it comes to uploading large quantities of data it's really pretty slow compared to other cloud based storage at least when it comes to uploading. From what I can glean uploads are about a quarter of download speeds. Drop box and Google drive are significantly faster and there are many others.
I don't think Apple ever intended users to upload huge quantities of data at one time. Rather a slow incremental addition of small packages of data over time. With Photos the process is further complicated by the need to compare existing data to the new data. Personally I depend on local backups for photos and music and Google Photos with its Backup Utility because it's free, fast, accessible, unlimited and automatic.


Sent from my iPhone using Mac-Forums

 

[Ratsima]

Same here. My experience with iCloud Photo Library was a huge disaster. I now use My Photo Stream to share current photos between devices, Dropbox Camera Uploads to move full resolution photos to my Mac and Google Photos for limited-resolution backup of all my photos. Of course I have both local and offsite backups of the full resolution versions of all my photos.

It really surprised me that iCloud Music Library does such a fine job of managing music while iCloud Photo Library does what, IMHO, is such a poor job.