It's impossible to transfer Photos library to Vision Pro without iCloud 🤯

[AlastorKatriona]

Yeah, the iPad is already the Apple device most held back by software and interface limitations, so it feels a bit weird to base their next generation of computing on their most hamstrung platform.

iPad isn't "held back" by anything. iPad is exactly what it needs to be. The only people who think iPad is "held back" are the people who have some unsubstantiated fantasy about the iPad form factor taking over the world of computing. This is never, ever going to happen. This is not an eventuality, or an inevitability. iPad has it's place in the world. It's a primary device for lots of people whose needs are simple enough that they don't need a computer to begin with. And it's a secondary device for people who want, but don't need, one. And it's a highly affordable product. As such, it's a $35-40 billion a year business. It's not missing its potential, it's achieving it.

Vision Pro's biggest problem is that it is essentially an iPad, without any of key tent poles of iPad, like affordability or portability.

 

[AlastorKatriona]

iCloud is horrific. It’s been nothing but reliability battles for me and every single person I know that tries to use it. Sometimes data will sync. Sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it’ll disappear.

Blows my mind that anyone thinks iCloud is acceptable in its current state.

Yeah hundreds of millions of people have no issues with it. Call Apple.

 

[boss.king]

iPad isn't "held back" by anything. iPad is exactly what it needs to be. The only people who think iPad is "held back" are the people who have some unsubstantiated fantasy about the iPad form factor taking over the world of computing. This is never, ever going to happen. This is not an eventuality, or an inevitability. iPad has it's place in the world. It's a primary device for lots of people whose needs are so simple that they don't need a computer to begin with. And it's a secondary device for people who want, but don't need, one. And it's a highly affordable product. As such, it's a $35-40 billion a year business. It's not missing its potential, it's achieving it.

Vision Pro's biggest problem is that it is essentially an iPad, without any of key tent poles of iPad, like affordability or portability.

That may be how you feel but it’s simply not true. Even as a secondary device, there are plenty of things the iPad does awkwardly or doesn’t do at all. Money has nothing to do with it, but it’s interesting how you always to pivot so quickly to making things about dollars to justify subpar experiences. Tim Cook would be proud.

 

[eicca]

Yeah hundreds of millions of people have no issues with it. Call Apple.

Hundreds of millions of people DON’T SAY they have any issues with it.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Because the AVP does not have a data port.
At least not a standard, user accessible data port.

He said this when pretty much instantaneous totally wireless music streaming off of your cell phone was still the stuff of fantasy.
In fact, a couple times throughout the years at the all things digital conference, Steve actually did express some interest in music streaming services, while still being skeptical at the time.


Agreed. This is a bit of an annoyance, but it is absolutely not exclusive to the AVP. Music library management has been one of my most requested iOS features for years.


Not sure what you expect them to do, they can’t just go around and retroactively add a different port to it, it’s already shipped.


Have you tried connecting your Mac to the VP as an external display, opening the files or photos app next to your Mac display and dragging and dropping between the two?
This works between two Macs, in between a Mac and an iPad, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work between a Mac and a VP.
But I don’t know.


Assuming the drag and drop/airdrop method doesn’t work, they don’t necessarily have to use iCloud.
Any cloud photo service will do the trick, as long as they can access it through the web browser.

It doesn’t need a data port. iPhone and iPad work to sync via wifi in the Mac finder for over a decade.

 

[surferfb]

iCloud is horrific. It’s been nothing but reliability battles for me and every single person I know that tries to use it. Sometimes data will sync. Sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it’ll disappear.

Blows my mind that anyone thinks iCloud is acceptable in its current state.

I know I’m just one random stranger on the internet, but I haven’t had an issue with iCloud in literally years. I have multiple Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, and get a new phone every year. It’s been rock solid for me for like 6 or 7 years now. I’ve use it as my primary file system, including my working files for my job for over 5 years now and have literally not a single issue.

Not saying you don’t have issues, but my guess is that my experience is a lot more normal than yours, and that the Apple Engineers designing this thing use it all day every day without issues either, which is why they consider it more than acceptable.

 

[boss.king]

Hundreds of millions of people DON’T SAY they have any issues with it.

Can confirm. Paying iCloud user, it’s slow and syncing is janky, and it only gets worse the more you put on it. This is just compared with other cloud storage services I’ve used, both paid and free.

It’s mostly fine as long as your don’t rely on it to do anything quickly, or if you’re prepared to babysit it.

This may be more of an issue with the apps syncing to it than the service itself, but the effect is the same. I click a button in one place. Wait, wait, wait. Check if it’s synced on another device. Nope. Wait, wait wait. Check again. Nope. Oh, there it is.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I know I’m just one random stranger on the internet, but I haven’t had an issue with iCloud in literally years. I have multiple Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, and get a new phone every year. It’s been rock solid for me for like 6 or 7 years now.

What concerns me is .... I don't even know if I am having issues with it really

I've run into some weird sync issues many times with my primary folder of usage (Excel stuff) that it concerns me other things like that are happening with my other many files and I simply am unaware of it.

 

[eicca]

I know I’m just one random stranger on the internet, but I haven’t had an issue with iCloud in literally years. I have multiple Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, and get a new phone every year. It’s been rock solid for me for like 6 or 7 years now. I’ve use it as my primary file system, including my working files for my job for over 5 years now and have literally not a single issue.

Not saying you don’t have issues, but my guess is that my experience is a lot more normal than yours, and that the Apple Engineers designing this thing use it all day every day without issues either, which is why they consider it more than acceptable.

I’m glad it works for you. Cuz it’s literally every single person I know and not just me that has problems with it. And that’s across hundreds and hundreds of devices between us.

 

[jz0309]

interesting question/observation ...
I have ~100 photos and I use Lightroom classic on my Mac to manage them, and I use Photos on my iPhone, but I also copy every single iPhone photo into my Mac to include in my LR library ...
This is one of my questions for my upcoming demo, how to view photos that are not in the photos app ...
Shall also be interesting what Adobe has in store to support VPro ...

and since iCloud is being discussed, I am happy with my "free" 5GB as all I share is health, contacts and keychain ...

 

[TechnoMonk]

I know I’m just one random stranger on the internet, but I haven’t had an issue with iCloud in literally years. I have multiple Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, and get a new phone every year. It’s been rock solid for me for like 6 or 7 years now. I’ve use it as my primary file system, including my working files for my job for over 5 years now and have literally not a single issue.

Not saying you don’t have issues, but my guess is that my experience is a lot more normal than yours, and that the Apple Engineers designing this thing use it all day every day without issues either, which is why they consider it more than acceptable.

TBH, iCloud was a mess early on. I started using it later, and never looked back. It works great for me with multiple devices, multiple family members and sharing. I do hope there is a way to stream photos from local network. Airdrop is work around but would be nice to do multiple photos from a directory.

 

[GrindedDown]

Sure, I agree that the ship has sailed and there is no data port on the current version.

But that does make me wonder why it wasn't included with v1.

Does that tell us anything about Apple's vision for the Vision "Pro"?

If this is going to be a productivity tool, stand alone, not tethered to a Mac, it needs a hardware port to facilitate transfers… iCloud or any "cloud" does not cut it when you're transferring and saving large files.

That it is missing makes me go…"Hmmmmm…" 🤷🏻‍♂️

I do not think it was because of costs or time constraints. I suspect Apple just do not want people (beyond the developers) to have access to that.

It definitely is that Apple doesn’t want people to have access to it. It’s at least possible that the reason they don’t want people to have that right now is because of the implementations. It is still possible that Apple will revamp how macOS and visionOS work together whether it’s for file, transfers, viewing content or manipulating Mack apps to bring it into an almost native looking visionOS interface. It’s also possible that Apple is looking into leveraging the power of a Mac to provide additional features and performance to something like vision, pro. The one thing that I do know about Apple is that if a feature isn’t fully flushed out enough where it becomes simple for the end user to make use of it, they won’t ship it.

My hopes is that Vision Pro ends up more like the iPad Pro. It took a while for iPad Pro to gain external storage support ability to use iPad as an external monitor with Mack. I expect that we will see some level of development like this . Of course, I’m really just hoping that the ability to plug-in external drives or use Vision Pro with a Mac for file management happens at some point in the future. Just because it doesn’t right now doesn’t mean that it won’t at some point.

 

[antiprotest]

The EU will have something to say about this.

 

[the future]

FWIW I‘m sure I saw in one/some of the video review(s) that both Airdrop and drag-and-drop do work. Which is not really a solution for OP‘s problem of synching 90 GB of pictures, but still.

 

[AlastorKatriona]

How about i do not like icloud. i do not want it. i should be able to own my own data and move it on to my own devices.

How about: that's not up to you?

 

[boss.king]

FWIW I‘m sure I saw in one/some of the video review(s) that both Airdrop and drag-and-drop do work. Which is not really a solution for OP‘s problem of synching 90 GB of pictures, but still.

How does drag and drop work? I didn’t think you could plug a Vision Pro in. Unless I’m missing something?

 

[falainber]

Poor design is typical for Apple. Here is another example: NBA App for Apple TV. On all other media streamers one can sign up with their nba.com ID and watch NBA League Path games for months. On Apple TV, your options are: subscribe to League Path via Apple or sign up in the app using your Apple device (Apple TV does not count) or sign up with your nba.com ID every day. Is not it idiotic?

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

It doesn’t need a data port. iPhone and iPad work to sync via wifi in the Mac finder for over a decade.

That's all they have to do.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

How about: that's not up to you?

Wrong, it very much is up to the user. Not to mention all the 'privacy' 'on-device' stuff that apple espouses.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

FWIW I‘m sure I saw in one/some of the video review(s) that both Airdrop and drag-and-drop do work. Which is not really a solution for OP‘s problem of synching 90 GB of pictures, but still.

I have like 400GB I would like to sync to the device. Probably another 300GB of music. Air drop is not a solution because even if you bring stuff over, I'm not sure there is any way to import it into the Photos/Music app on the AVP.

It's sad, but Synology photo and music apps probably 'just work' and might be the better route.

 

[Jim Lahey]

Word to the wise re: iCloud Photos. Some years ago I re-enabled the feature on my iPhone that had no photos on it at that time. The reasonable assumption was that they would be added back to the phone, mirroring my other devices. I then watched them disappear in realtime from my iPad as iCloud decided to destroy every photo I’d ever taken.

Fortunately I had Power Nap disabled on my Mac. I turned off my router, woke my Mac and exported everything manually while not connected to the internet. Long story short I was eventually able to get all my photos back into iCloud, but all my albums were obliterated forever. It took a lot of time and effort to repair everything.

Moral of the story is never trust the ‘cloud’ with your data. I no longer use it.

ETA: If I didn't have a Mac, I absolutely would have lost everything. Forever. A cautionary tale for those scoffing at people who choose not to use it.

 

[klasma]

Because the AVP does not have a data port.
At least not a standard, user accessible data port.

This is not true. Apple sells a USB-C dongle to developers. And I suspect the USB-C port on the battery might support pass-through of the same functionality. At least that would be technically trivial if Apple cared.

 

[tobyringle69]

Im more amazed anyone thought you COULD transfer entire libraries to the VP without iCloud sync. It's not possible with any other Apple device, why would this one be different?

 

[klasma]

No one believes in Vision Pro less than I do, and even I think this is perfectly acceptable, because you should already be using iCloud.

It’s reasonable not wanting to have to depend on the cloud, not to mention on a specific cloud provider (iCloud). They make it so easy to connect with Mac Virtual Display. Why not allow syncing in an iTunes-like way with the same ease? All the necessary protocols already exist from iOS/iPadOS.

 

[klasma]

The EU will have something to say about this.

Not sure it will, at least not from a data protection perspective, since Apple operates data centers in Europe.