ICloud

Apple Computer's cloud Data Synch/Back Up/Sharing service

== Dealing with Photos across MacOs X/IOS (May'2016) ==

cf recent 2016-04-24-IphoneIphotoPhotosSyncDeleteHandling

Process1 desired (by The Wife)

• take photo on IPhone
• get it on to Mac, in Photos, for permanent use
• at some point delete it from IPhone

Some misc thoughts

• in the past she's like having it work online so she could take photos while traveling and her staff could access them before she came back. But we'll assume she's using a work ITunes/ICloud account for that.

I do not want IcloudPhotoLibrary to be used, that wants you to sync all your photos to ICloud like a paid Back Up service and I don't want that, mainly because I don't trust Apple to run this safely.

• The Wife thinks that having our own Back Up-s will protect us, so might want this ease-of-use.
• But since the library would be bigger than an IPhone, what does the phone store?
  • With the "Optimize Storage" featured turned on, it stores thumbnails of your entire (?) library, which you can click on to access. It stores the full-size "recent" photos. What does that mean? I think it has its own set of rules considering recently-taken and recently-viewed, and you can't tweak it, nor pick some photos and say "move these to cloud-only I don't want them taking up phone space".

Ergo MyPhotoStream is the key service.

So process is

• take photo on IPhone
• sync to MyPhotoStream via WiFi
  • ack this doesn't work for videos?!?!?!
• at home IMac, view MyPhotoStream inside Photos app, then ctrl-click on them to Import them into Photos
• then safe to delete from IPhone, they'll get removed from MyPhotoStream but not from Photos.

Process2 desired by The Wife

• have photos in Photos on IMac
• share subsets to IPhone
• be able to delete safely from IPhone

Solutions/options 0. use ICloud Photo Sharing, 0. Export photos to a folder, use ITunes to sync that folder

She also likes to share kids' videos and photos of their art, etc. - currently we use GDrive for that, which is cheaper.

== Jun13-18'2016 migrate to Photos ==

migrate to PhotosApp and ICloud

• Jun13: do repair/rebuild of IPhoto library http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2016-01-30-UverseWifiHinkyAgain
• Jun13: import/convert to Photos https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204655
• do some random spot checking
  • Photos says 17,317 photos
  • iPhoto says 16,532 photos, 91GB
• Jun14: check to make sure videos came over
• Jun14: convert other IPhoto libraries (kids)
• hide IPhoto libraries so they don't get used???? No, Photos actually shares underlying data with IPhoto! But don't ever use IPhoto again on those libraries, because after conversion they don't stay in sync! https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204476 - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204655
• Jun14: need to re-create Smart Albums
• Jun27: try using ITunes to sync a Photos Album (in Family library) to IPhone
  • even though Family is the open library in Photos, ITunes only shows the albums from the Portfolio library
  • try to post in forums, but can't! Once I'm logged in I get error message as though forums are down!
  • so going to call

== Jun28'2016 end up calling in to support ==

So current state is

• Family library ~120KB, Portfolio library ~30GB
• Portfolio is the System Library partially synced to ICloud - there are ~8800 photos there
• there are other libraries, too - smaller, not needing fancy processes

Goals

• make Family instead of Portfolio made the System Library in ICloud
• be able to synch album from any library

Call

• How use ITunes to synch an album? It syncs only from the SystemLibrary. You can switch that back and forth as necessary, which will automatically turn off ICloud. Then (after doing ITunes stuff) you Must remember to switch back the other library to be the System Library again later before you (or someone else) turn ICloud back on!
• ICloud Photo Library System Library change
  • delete ICloud photo library from IMac SysPrefs/icloud
  • launch Photos with Family library; go into Prefs and change System Library to be the current/Family library
  • turn on ICloud, let it sync

Outcome (next morning): looks bad

• photos from ICloud (Portfolio) getting added into Family local library?!?
• Portfolio library and ICloud Photo Library both have 8861 photos
• check IPhoto Portfolio library, which I know isn't perfectly in-sync, just to get order-of-magnitude: it has 9019 photos. So at least I'm fairly comfortable that nothing has been deleted from the Photos Portfolio library.

Jun29 call back to Apple

• use Time Machine to restore just the Family library
• turn off ICloud Photo Library (from the Mac SysPrefs) so it won't re-download the next time someone launches Photos
• decide that the safest plan is to just not turn back on ICloud Photo Library for a month, so that the Delete becomes permanent! Then will check ICloud Photo Library from Safari view to confirm it's gone, then double-check all my settings and finally turn ICloud Photo Library back on inside Photos.