Mac Yosemite 10.10.3, Photos and iCloud (Your iCloud is full…)
This is for the Mac and i– users. Apple released the latest Yosemite OSX 10.10.3 on 8 April 2015, it’s a significant feature rich update with the all new Photos which replaces iPhoto. Usually, I do not recommend updating to the latest OS or firmware so soon after release, but if you run into problems with iPhoto, you may want to update to 10.10.43 and Photos. And so far, I have not run into problems with 10.10.3.
As many of you who set your Mac to auto-update as recommended by Apple, your Mac would likely already have the latest iPhoto version 9.6.1 (dated 21 Mar 2015) which Apple pushes mainly to prepare for the migration to Photos when 10.10.3 comes out. I found some buggy behavior after this iPhoto update including improper import of new photos – lost connection between imported thumbnails and the original photos – not able to show or to work on the originals of these newly imports! If you run into this problem, before you go into drastic fixes as suggested in many online posts (but none without much solid success after much toil and worry), try my recommendation below.
- First and foremost, DONOT delete the originals of your photos on your SD card! Keep them for this time at least.
- Delete the improperly imported photos from iPhotos.
- Update to Yosemite 10.10.3, you can do this even if you have not been invited yet. Just click the little “apple” icon on the top left hand corner, go to “About this Mac” and confirm the existing OS version, then click the “Software Update” button and it will show you what updates are available for your Mac. Select the 10.10.3 system update.
- This would take about 30 min or so and your computer will reboot, so better save everything first.
- After update, your iPhoto app would be replaced by the new Photos app (including the icon in the Dock). Open it and you’d be fronted with the typical iPad style with white background (which I hate). Now you can re-import your new photos and it should work fine.
Back on what I thought about Photos and the rest. To my much dissatisfaction, Photos also replaces Aperture – which means Apple is no longer upgrading or may be supporting iPhoto and Aperture. While the new Photos promises much support for new features like cloud support, time-lapsed photos, flexible sync and availability of all your photos across all of your i-Devices, it lacks much of the more advanced editing features which Aperture has. The most stupid thing is that the Aperture photo library no longer shares the same one or sync with the Photos library – like what iPhotos has done beautifully with Aperture since version iPhoto 9.3. And that means whatever you do in improving your photos in Aperture would no longer be automatically saved back to the master Photos library! I think all Aperture users should push Apple to provide this feature back soonest!
Now on iCloud. Cloud storage is going to be the trend and one day will replace most of our local storage as it promises security and availability to all devices all the time. However, providers like Apple, etc are getting big monies by pushing people to use them giving them very little alternatives. Photos is yet another thing in that direction. It’s fine if you choose to go that way, but if you have lots of photos, you would likely be hit with significant monthly charges for such storage. You would also be faced with a very long time in uploading your photos to iCloud – could be weeks via your internet (but that’s fine and unavoidable if you choose this route). What I don’t like is that Apple (and many similar providers) don’t say/help users with an estimate of how much that would cost say just by uploading your say 10,000 photos (well I now have 36,000, that’s before my next project – scanning of thousands of old slides and photos!). Many users are now constantly warned with the nagging pop-up message that “Your iCloud storage is full, please upgrade”. My recommendation is to quickly review your settings to see what are being uploaded to the iCloud, and un-tick those which are not really necessary, e.g. those which you already have your own sound working backup plan, or those you don’t need full syncing across your devices. Well, at least that’s my approach before they further reduce their cloud storage costs – but I’m a miser.
