I am having a lot of problems with my iCloud library when I edit photos or share photos ...it takes forever to download from the cloud (it keeps saying ‘Preparing...” and the circle (that indicates the download progress) barely moves. Also, when I use the ‘share sheet’ it takes forever for it to download the photo to share it.....at first I thought it was a problem with my WiFi at home but it seems to do this everywhere…Also, when i try to edit these photos that are slow to download, for some reason, duplicates show up…the duplicates usually are lower resolution and if the original photo is a Live photo, the duplicate is usually not a Live photo
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Having problems with iCloud photos downloading VERY slowly and making duplicates?
- Thread starter ToddJ
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- icloud icloud photos ios 11 photos slow
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Are you trying to download these one at a time? If you try to do them all at once it can take very long. Also if your phone has enough storage you might want to disable iCloud Photo Library.
With that many photos you might want to consider another options. See:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/photos-library-too-large.2114848/
Yes! All the darn time. I also cannot understand why single photos that one selects to share (via an iMessage for example) just sit on the “preparing” sheet waiting ... even with high broadband connections. It’s ridiculous to be honest.
I have a similar problem but with videos stored in the iCloud library: download time takes forever and some videos simply cannot be watched. I’m thinking in storing my library in an external hard drive to solve this issue....cannot understand why Apple won’t allow streaming videos stored in iCloud
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I've had this problem with iCloud FOR YEARS. Any time I want to show family members old videos of photos I have taken it's a tedious struggle to get iCloud to consistently download photos and videos without completely freezing and stopping altogether. Doesn't matter that I have completely acceptably fast WiFi/internet access. It's like the whole world runs on 55mbps and iCloud operates like it's run out of a 56k modem.
In contrast, Google Photos is lightening fast. But I still use iCloud because I really want to believe that this system can work.
[doublepost=1540898064][/doublepost]How does Google Photos interact with the Mac Photo app?
I'll just add some fuel to the fire. I have Windows 10. I right-click on the icloud taskbar icon, then click download photos. Gives me a polite message saying I have a large amount of information so it might take a while. It starts downloading about 2500 files. I only have 200GB of icloud space and 90GB of that is free AND it's shared with my family. So I figure there's no way it's more than 10-20gb of photos/videos of mine.
Been over 24 hours and I still have 1557 items to download, not even half done.
I have a 300mbps connection. I downloaded a 16GB Microsoft Virtualization session for VMWare in about 4 or 5 minutes. 10-20gb, even slowly should take 30 minutes at the most. Looking like 48 hours plus.
The whole icloud photo system is a stink bomb. No permanent backup. Slow downloads. I guess I really pay apple for icloud storage so I can backup my devices but it sure is annoying for photos.
Google photos is a good option, photos are free, but you have to pay for video space. I'm already paying Apple, I'd have to pay Google too.
Is it really too much to want to download my icloud photos to my computer in a timely fashion? These are jpg and mov files. Not full length blu-ray movies.
I guess the bottom line is that I have one question for Apple: "Huh?"
Oh, and don't get me started about using icloud with a VPN.
Been over 24 hours and I still have 1557 items to download, not even half done.
I have a 300mbps connection. I downloaded a 16GB Microsoft Virtualization session for VMWare in about 4 or 5 minutes. 10-20gb, even slowly should take 30 minutes at the most. Looking like 48 hours plus.
The whole icloud photo system is a stink bomb. No permanent backup. Slow downloads. I guess I really pay apple for icloud storage so I can backup my devices but it sure is annoying for photos.
Google photos is a good option, photos are free, but you have to pay for video space. I'm already paying Apple, I'd have to pay Google too.
Is it really too much to want to download my icloud photos to my computer in a timely fashion? These are jpg and mov files. Not full length blu-ray movies.
I guess the bottom line is that I have one question for Apple: "Huh?"
Oh, and don't get me started about using icloud with a VPN.
I was using Google Photos until recently, which worked really well, but I decided to move over to iCloud so that everything's in one place. What a mistake, thumbnails are there but if I try to open any of them my phone freezes. I have around 28gb worth of photos, I really can't believe that that's a lot. It's a new iPhone XS as well
I've been having this issue for 2+ years as well.
I just sent the feedback below to Apple, and I would suggest everyone else do the same so they can maybe fix the issue!
"Hello,
I have been using iCloud Photos for about three years now and STILL have been having an issue of individual photos "preparing" or downloading when I try to show the full resolution version or send the picture through iMessage. Whether I have lightning fast wifi or LTE, I always always always have this issue. It seems especially apparent on older photos (the older the photo, the longer it takes).
Can you PLEASE fix this bug so photos load much quicker, similar to Google Photos? Google Photos take no more than 2-3 seconds to fully load a photo, but the iCloud Photos on my iPhone can sometimes take over 5 minutes and STILL NOT LOAD the photo... It's very annoying.
It would also be a great feature to be able to have "starred" or "favorite" pictures or albums that remain downloaded."
I just sent the feedback below to Apple, and I would suggest everyone else do the same so they can maybe fix the issue!
"Hello,
I have been using iCloud Photos for about three years now and STILL have been having an issue of individual photos "preparing" or downloading when I try to show the full resolution version or send the picture through iMessage. Whether I have lightning fast wifi or LTE, I always always always have this issue. It seems especially apparent on older photos (the older the photo, the longer it takes).
Can you PLEASE fix this bug so photos load much quicker, similar to Google Photos? Google Photos take no more than 2-3 seconds to fully load a photo, but the iCloud Photos on my iPhone can sometimes take over 5 minutes and STILL NOT LOAD the photo... It's very annoying.
It would also be a great feature to be able to have "starred" or "favorite" pictures or albums that remain downloaded."
I’ve been having this problem for at least year. I’ve got about 150k photos and 7k videos. The system was clearly not designed to handle this number. Not only is it sometimes slow for download images when trying to attach, it can timeout causing the app to crash. I don’t think I have a choice but to go to google photos or amazon. I’ve had not the best experience with Google’s uploaded app on a Mac. Amazon’s ripped through everything pretty quick. My library is on SSD raid0 snd I’ve got a reasonably fast Internet connection. Any delay is being of their app or purposely rate limiting.
This issue is beyond frustrating.
This issue is beyond frustrating.
MY SITUATION
I can relate to this situation (>100000 photos and >3000 videos). On MacBook Pro 2016 i7 SSD.
My plan was to merge all my photos to a single library, keep them in iCloud with optimizing on.
PowerPhotos is useful for the task of merging libraries.
There appears to be no software that can dedupe an optimized library (though I reckon in theory it should be possible, but it's probably Apple's fault in not attaching enough info to the compressed 'thumbnail' files). So I decided to start a new library on an external 2TB SSD, make it the main library, turn on iCloud for Photos and turn off optimize so that the full photos would come down and I could then dedupe.
Downloading was initially sporadic and slow. After a while, it settled down to slowly downloading everything. It is about a third of the way through after a week.
MY TRICK
(to make the download faster)
Go to the library photos in the Photos app and select all. Then choose File>Export and export originals to some folder (preferably on a fast disk). Because Photos will consider this a priority more important than the normal iCloud sync it will want to get the full-size files much faster than normal (for me seems to be about 5x as fast). I don't really want the exported files so I will throw them away later when the library has finished. One downside of this method is you need plenty of disk space (for both the photos coming into the library and the exports before you throw them away.)
I can relate to this situation (>100000 photos and >3000 videos). On MacBook Pro 2016 i7 SSD.
My plan was to merge all my photos to a single library, keep them in iCloud with optimizing on.
PowerPhotos is useful for the task of merging libraries.
There appears to be no software that can dedupe an optimized library (though I reckon in theory it should be possible, but it's probably Apple's fault in not attaching enough info to the compressed 'thumbnail' files). So I decided to start a new library on an external 2TB SSD, make it the main library, turn on iCloud for Photos and turn off optimize so that the full photos would come down and I could then dedupe.
Downloading was initially sporadic and slow. After a while, it settled down to slowly downloading everything. It is about a third of the way through after a week.
MY TRICK
(to make the download faster)
Go to the library photos in the Photos app and select all. Then choose File>Export and export originals to some folder (preferably on a fast disk). Because Photos will consider this a priority more important than the normal iCloud sync it will want to get the full-size files much faster than normal (for me seems to be about 5x as fast). I don't really want the exported files so I will throw them away later when the library has finished. One downside of this method is you need plenty of disk space (for both the photos coming into the library and the exports before you throw them away.)
Chiming in THREE years after you posted this question, and Apple has done nothing to resolve it. This has NOTHING to do with your internet connection speed or the number or size of images to be downloaded. I have a gigabit speed connection and it just took 52 second to download a single 12MB jpeg. And this is on a quiet, non-holiday, Saturday morning at 8:15AM EST, so I can't imagine Apple's servers (or their CDN's servers for that matter) should be under heavy load.
That roughly translates to a 100Mbps download speed from Apple's servers while my internet clocks in at 4X that speed.
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