And I worked on the review on two different Macs. I took a lot of photos using three different iPhones (my old iPhone X, and my review unit iPhones XS and XS Max) while writing my XS review last month. It’s not just very reliable, but very fast. What surprised me about this isn’t just that it’s so dreadfully slow, but that iCloud Photo Library has gotten amazingly good in the last few years. That’s pretty much exactly what I was seeing on my iPhone. Bad Apple! Weĭon’t see that sort of poor performance with Dropbox or Googleĭrive, and this behavior is both unnecessary and driving people Library and the speed of your Internet connection. Process can take days, depending on the size of your Photos It does this in order to compare the library’s contents to the However, there’s a nasty side effect of turning iCloud off andīack on: iCloud Photo Library needs to re-upload all your photos. The iCloud preference pane throwing an ominous error, the problems To solve these problems, I turned iCloud off and back on. Messages, Wi-Fi calling wasn’t working, and after upgrading toġ0.13.3, I was unable to enable auto-unlock with my Apple Watch. I was seeing some strange problems on my 27-inch iMac running
HOW TO SIGN OUT OF ICLOUD PHOTO LIBRARY MAC
Whatever algorithm it’s using for this is slow as molasses.Īdam Engst wrote about a similar problem on the Mac earlier this year: When you turn iCloud Photo Library back on, it has no idea which of the items in your local iPhone library are duplicates of items in your iCloud library, and so it has to check them one by one. I let it run overnight and it only moved from 4,183 remaining items to just over 4,000.Įffectively, I think what happens is that when you turn off iCloud Photo Library, it leaves all the photos and videos on your phone in your local library. I kept the phone plugged in last night and checked every hour, and it was only processing about 15 or 16 items per hour. This process was proceeding really slowly. It got through most of them fairly quickly, but the last 4,500 or so were effectively stuck. I don’t think it was actually uploading them - I think that’s just the word Photos uses to indicate what it’s doing - but rather checking each of the photos on the phone against each of the photos in my iCloud library.
It didn’t delete my photos, but once I was signed back in to iCloud, the Photos app was trying to re-upload my entire library (over 28,000 photos and 1,100 videos) back to iCloud. After one more reboot of the phone, Instant Hotspot was working perfectly.Ī side effect of signing out of and back into iCloud is that it seemed to reset my iPhone’s photo library sync state. So I did that on the iPhone, and, long story short, that seemed to fix the issue. This makes some sense, because all of these Continuity features go through iCloud. I did some searching on the web and eventually stumbled on a thread that suggested signing out of iCloud and then signing back in. I had a trip to New York coming up, and wanted to fix this. Weird, right? This was all on the release version of iOS 12.0.1, by the way. And then eventually the device name was changed back to “iPhone” again. Not even “John’s iPhone”, which is the default when you set up a new iPhone. I then noticed that my iPhone’s name (Settings → General → About → Name) had been changed to “iPhone”. I tried rebooting the Mac and iPhone, of course. So the hotspot worked, but the magic Instant Hotspot feature wasn’t working. turned it on and left it on - my iPhone’s hotspot was listed as a regular Wi-Fi network on my Mac, and when I connected, it worked just fine. If I went into the iPhone’s Settings app and enabled the Personal Hotspot manually - i.e. My Wi-Fi menu no longer listed my iPhone, only my iPad. These “Personal Hotspots” show up at the top of the list of available Wi-Fi networks, in their own special section of the menu. That’s the feature where you can leave the cellular hotspot turned off in Settings, but enable it on-the-fly from a Mac when you connect via the Wi-Fi menu. Sometimes It’s Better to Just Start Over With iCloud Photo Library Syncing Friday, 12 October 2018Įarly this week I noticed that I wasn’t able to use the Instant Hotspot feature with my iPhone XS.