I Regret the Blood Pact I Have Made With iCloud Photos

Hey, Im a follower (on RSS). Myself, and others have been in this world. Take a peek at immich. Yes, I know its selfhosted, but this is what I had to do with a growing family setup. For my, hard drives AND backups (backblaze++) are still cheaper than icloud.

Initially to try to save space, I split out videos and put them on plex home server, but with immich, pics and video are now in the same place again.

Im very impressed at how mature Immich is. Worth a look.

I don’t trust iCloud in the least, but it is convenient.

I store, edit, and rate everything locally in Lightroom, and only the 3+ star items get exported from there to be imported into Photos.

That way the stuff I actually want to look at again is readily available on all my devices but stupid iCloud bugs are less concerning since it is not my source of truth and it does not touch the original files.

I recommend using PowerPhotos app to transfer photos between libraries. It supports AppleScript so it's possible to automate transferring https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

An extraordinarily, I feel, disingenuous, article from someone, one would imagine, that knew Apple/iCloud well enough to not use iCloud photos. A mac power user would've advised against iCloud music and photos except for the most non technical of users.

The opening line is enough - why stick with something for so long? "Sometimes, I do not recognize a trap until I am already in it. Photos in iCloud is one such situation.
When Apple launched iCloud Photo Library in 2014...".

Solution: Don’t have your entire family share a single 6TB plan: Get and share separate smaller iCloud+ plans. You can still be a single family group.

Since you have the huge library, get the 2TB plan for yourself, and everyone else can get their own or share a smaller 200GB or 2TB plan.

https://www.reddit.com/r/iCloud/comments/1h6nn0r/comment/m0ezllw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Re: paying for services: You’re paying for convenience. Does anyone really need access to all their photos all the time? Probably not. Is it nice to have? Sure is. Everyone will have to make their own choice on priority there.

I’m running out of space on my 2 TB plan and wanted to clear out space.

I know there are way too many useless videos in my library. It’s mind boggling that I cannot use file size as a criteria for smart albums!

The lack of clear sync status for items is terrible but sadly not surprising. This is typical Apple: hide all the details from all users since “it just works”… except it doesn’t just work and then you’re stuck.

I have thousands, but not hundreds of thousands, of photos. I use an external plugin device for SATA drives that I buy, for next to nothing, at the university surplus outlet.

I recommend osxphotos - a command line tool.

There is a reason that I have refused to ever allow iCloud Photo syncing or ever purchase Apple’s storage subscription.

Once you start, it's impossible to ever stop.

Netflix, Prime, AppleTV, Spotify, I can cancel them any time I want.

Managing photo libraries is where I would like AI to shine. Forget the generative stuff, an AI function that was good enough at purging my library of all the ones that I would delete myself but none of the good ones (if I were to sit down and actually do it - which I never do), that would be a killer feature I'd happily pay for!

It would have to be trained on my preferences of course, like presenting me with a choice and a recommendation of which are keepers and fine tune until it certain that it has me figured out. And then just process my entire library and delete away. I'm pretty sure something between 50 and 80 percent of my library are bad photos or similar enough that I don't want to keep it. Of course, same thing applies to videos, I want to purge the bad videos as well.

This would be such a relief mentally and release much wanted disk space and save money instead of hitting the dreaded 2 TB wall.

PowerPhotos by Fat Cat Software could be a useful tool - https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

Another recommendation for Immich. Fully self-hosted, you are in full control, your photos are not shared with the FBI or seen by Apple subcontractors, excellent cloud-free facial recognition. I run it in Docker on my home backup NAS (a Minisforum N5 Pro running Alpine Linux), holding 16K photos, 2.5K videos for a total of 3TB.

I don't think the issue is where the photos are stored. There are options for that.

The problem, as usual, is Apple's tight coupling of the frontent Photos app (the part you want to keep because that's the app you tought your elderly parents to use) and the backend, which should be managed by an app running in the background. I don't think that's possible yet, even with Apple's new entitlements for background photo syncing apps, because you still need to sync the entire library locally and you will lose the metadata that syncs with iCloud Photos. If the interoperability could be assured, I think the whole issue would disappear.

I ditched Apple photos at least 15 years ago because something about how the fingers were handled caused an issue when changing colors.

I can't remember the exact details, but I do remember feeling that they were a bit out of my control.

Now I'm neck deep in Google photos, but at least I can export all the photos as actual files.

Kristoffer, I don’t understand your last sentence. You can export from Photos…

Paying Apple indefinitely to manage my media somehow never appealed to me. I still use Photos.app to organize the files from different sources, but I'm definitely looking for alternatives, possibly self-hosted.

You do not need your entire photo library available on all your devices at all times.

Your friends and family are just too polite to tell you they don’t care about your holiday, or don’t want to see your children doing the new thing. You’re the bore who forces everyone to watch the slide carousel in the darkened room at what you had told people would be a cocktail party. No one cares about what your doggo did.

Of course they want to see your cat.

Offload your photos to your Mac (which you back up), and keep them there, for you, and you alone to look at. No one else cares about your photos, they are all full to the Baudrillardian visual limit from looking at their own photos.

@Indigo @Someone The issue is that Apple’s system isn’t designed for that. You can’t easily tell it to store everything on your Mac but only sync recent photos or certain libraries to iCloud and other devices.

Photo Stream, some people might still remember, was a surprisingly good product and all I ever needed from iCloud. I'm still sad it was discontinued in 2023. It even worked without treating iCloud as your "truth". Those were the good times, when selling services was not the number one priority at Apple HQ.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/25/apple-my-photo-stream-shutdown-what-to-do/

@MichaelTsai because I believe in solving workflows, and not just snark... ;)

Using Hazel (or folder actions if you want to be trapped in a buggy Apple made solution), you can automate organising your photos with Airdrop as the ingestion mechanism, you can then have an automation that surfaces a rolling x-date-old subset, either as a search query, or a copied-and then pruned second instance (which will add no extra disk use on APFS), and then you can have Finder sync that rolling folder back to your iOS device as the Photo sync step.

why not create a new apple ID, and subscribe from there?

eg create a new ID, 2TB.

@Someone You solution is basically to stop using the Photos app. So it won’t handle edits and organization done in Photos on the Mac, and the photos will end up second-class in terms of integration and possibly lower resolution on the iPhone. And now importing to the Mac is a manual process. I stand by what I said about it not being easy.

@qing I don’t think that would help because only one Apple ID can sync with iCloud per macOS user account.

@MichaelTsai Hazel does have an "import to Photos" step pre-built into it, what Photos on Mac doesn't have is the ability to import to a referenced library; so you have to be locked into a proprietary directory format, with destructively renamed files. You can still use the Hazel workflow to pull images off the phone to a referenced library structure, add to Photos in the process, then sync a subset back with the Photos option in Finder's sync.

But Photos is a set of handcuffs, regardless of how you use it.

I second Daan, we didn't realize just how good we had it with iCloud Photo Stream. Convenient, free, stayed out of the way and still let you manage media using the first-party applications, used your own private storage. The ephemeral nature of it was a nice bonus in the world of cloud services the hoover every last piece of data up for eternity.

Yes, there are conveniences with a completely online-sync'd DAM (which is all photos.app is now), too, but dare I say, I'd be more than happy to go back.

In cases like this my confidence in GUI apps is never great. I prefer OSXPhotos: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

"OSXPhotos provides the ability to interact with and query Apple's Photos.app library on macOS and Linux. You can query the Photos library database — for example, file name, file path, and metadata such as keywords/tags, persons/faces, albums, etc. You can also easily export both the original and edited photos. OSXPhotos also works with iPhoto libraries though some features are available only for Photos. [...] Most features work on macOS 26.1 but OSXPhotos does yet fully support 26.x. Notably OSXPhotos cannot read shared albums on macOS 26.x."

Available in MacPorts, Brew, pip and uv. Also works on Linux with limitations.