Apple would very much like its users to stay in its ecosystem. “It just works”, they claim, except of course it doesn’t!
A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the Photos app on my MacBook Pro (MBP) was no longer syncing properly with iCloud Photos. Some of my more recent pictures were missing. I tried a few solutions suggested by the ever-helpful Google, but none of them worked. All I can see is a message saying it is updating my pictures, but none of the said pictures have actually appeared on my MBP.
To make matters worse, recently I tried to edit some pictures on my MBP. After marking about 40 or so pictures as favourites, I AirDropped them onto my MBP and imported them into Photos. Why go through all the trouble of AirDropping and importing, you may ask? Well, because Photos refuses to update my library properly and has been stuck in limbo for the last few weeks (see above paragraph).
Anyway, after making some edits on the photos, I tried to export them to the Desktop. That was when my troubles really started. For some inexplicable reason, a few of the photos could not be exported, no matter what I tried. Other photos taken with the same camera (my iPhone) at the same time and setting were OK, so I have no idea why these photos generated errors.
Breathe in…breathe out…
I still wanted to keep the edited photos though so I AirDropped them back to my iPhone. To my horror, iCloud Photos decided that these were the same pictures as the original ones (despite the edits I’ve made) and ‘helpfully’ replaced the original versions with the edited ones. Excellent, my photo library is now a mess. Gee, ‘thanks’ iCloud Photos!
To say that I’m annoyed at this would be an understatement. I’ve decided not to put up with the stupidity that is iCloud Photos any further. Nor am I going to torture myself any longer with Photos for macOS, possibly the dumbest app in existence!
And so, the search begins for a better photo management workflow…
P/S: You can probably tell that this article is a bit of an incoherent rant. But seriously, Apple needs to fix their cloud offering. It’s a big effing mess!
Imran Idris 