iCloud photos not synced between devices

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iCloud photos not synced between devices

I don't know where to start, but iCloud Photos is all sorts of fubar.

I disabled iCloud Photos on my iPad and iPhone AND deleted every image in the Photos album, but their respective storage still numbers in the GB.

On my Mac iCloud Photos is still enabled, but when logging into iCloud.com/photos it shows that it's "disabled and will delete in 30 days".

I tried to disable iCloud sync on my Mac Photos, but it complains that not all full resolution photos have been downloaded yet. That was hours ago on a 1gig download pipe, so it sure feels like it's stuck and not downloading anything.

Is there an simple way to keep my Photos app on my Mac (currently numbering over 26k images), disable iCloud Photos EVERYWHERE ELSE, and then enable iCloud Photos with the Mac Photos app as the base?

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 11.3

Posted on May 21, 2021 1:20 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Shareef Yousef Author

Level 1

75 points

May 25, 2021 7:25 AM in response to TonyCollinet

The plan wasn't cancelled as I'm on the premium Apple One plan (includes 2TB of iCloud storage). My entire library is only 120GB). iCloud Photos just uses whatever storage plan you have available in your iCloud account, it doesn't have its own plan. So if you disable iCloud Photos, all the photos would be deleted from iCloud (but the plan will remain the same).

The issue was that I still had iCloud photos enabled on my Mac, so disabling it on the iPhone/iPad shouldn't disable iCloud photos. My guess is that this is a bug within iCloud photos as it doesn't check across devices.

Regardless, I did follow your suggestions for my Mac and essentially created a new photos library. The new library is syncing with iCloud now (though I can't get it to sync smart albums, not sure if that's just not supported or it's another issue).

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Answer 2

May 21, 2021 3:57 PM in response to Shareef Yousef

1 - "disabled and will be deleted" suggests that somehow you have cancelled your icloud plan. Nothing will be deleted from iCloud on a paid up subscription unless you deliberately delete it. Is it possible that in turning off iCloud on phone/ipad, you have also cancelled the plan? Check in your subscriptions. If you have you will need to restart the plan to prevent everything being deleted.

2 - Download speed for iCloud is not limited by your connection speed - it normally goes MUCH slower than that. By way of example, my 50GB 5000 image library took 48 hours full time to sync on a fast connection - much slower than the connection speed. However, if full resolution images are not already downloaded, why not? Have you enabled "optimise mac storage"? If so full resolution images will never be downloaded unless they are needed (eg for editing)

3 - The best way to get your mac to download everything will be to create a new empty library - set it as the system library, enable iCloud without optimise mac storage. Photos will then download everything from iCloud into that new library - subject to the speed limitations mentioned above.

***

1 - Create a new EMPTY library on the external disk. (Hold down the option key while starting photos)

2 - Open the new empty library in photos.

3 - In photos preferences set it to the system library (click the button)

4 - In photos preferences iClound - turn icloud on with download originals.

5 - Wait - for photos to download all your images from iCloud into your freshly minted library. It may take some time - possibly days. Leave the mac on with photos open while it is doing it.

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Answer 3

May 25, 2021 9:46 AM in response to Shareef Yousef

Smart albums are not synced through iCloud.

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iCloud photos not synced between devices

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