Tag: Photos

Further adventures with the iCloud Photo Library… why can’t we just do this all on the web?

As I’ve mentioned previously, I have a problem with my iCloud Photo Library. A few problems, in fact:

I only add photos/videos to the library from my iPhone. I might occasionally take photos with my iPad, but I almost never need to add those to my library.
The way Apple “manages” storage for the iCloud Photo Library is woefully inadequate. As I noted in the post linked above, there are only three options: put everything on your device, let your device decide on some arbitrary amount of free space to keep, or don’t have the photos on your device at all.
The way the options work is not adequate for me with an unwieldy library of over 50,000 photos, and neither the storage space nor the need to have my whole photo library on my iPad and Mac.

I pretty much have no interest in the new Apple Intelligence features that are rolling out as we speak. But today I did learn there’s one intriguing new ability. (At least, I think it’s new.) The Photos app can now identify duplicates in your library, and purge them, retaining only the highest-quality version and merging all of the meta data.

I immediately took advantage of that feature, and removed about a thousand duplicate images.

But I still was confronting a very convoluted situation with my new iPad, which has only a meager 64 GB of storage. (I was seduced by a “Cyber Week” promotion to upgrade from my old 8th Gen to a 10th Gen that was on sale for $259, but I overlooked the fact that in so doing, I was going from 128 GB to 64 GB.) The whole damn library got loaded onto the new iPad before I could stop it, and now I’m dealing with trying to purge it.

There should be a simple and fast way to just delete the entire thing from a device, but there isn’t. Apparently turning off iCloud Photos on the device deletes everything, but… does it? It’s not instant, and there’s no progress indicator. The photos do seem to be very slowly disappearing from the device, but the lack of clarity is maddening.

Meanwhile, I also (finally) discovered something that I think should obviate all of this nonsense. You can very easily access your entire iCloud Photo Library from iCloud on the web!

Yes, just go to icloud.com/photos and log in to your account, and you have a fairly decent set of tools for interacting with your entire iCloud Photo Library without having to store any of it on-device.

One look at the crap I keep in my library should make it clear why I don’t need this filling up all of my devices’ storage.

Why isn’t this one of the default options? In fact, it seems like it would be a no-brainer for Apple to make the Photos app present an option to interact with the library in the cloud only. I know there are bandwidth and connectivity implications, so it would probably involve a reduced set of features.

I suppose, in a way, that’s what the option to optimize storage does — or at least what it’s intended to do — but I am still astonished that it works in such a way that even the reduced/optimized images can fill up your device storage. Why doesn’t it just keep the tiny thumbnails plus the meta data (and no videos!) on-device, and only retrieve larger versions when you interact with an individual image directly?

Again… maybe it actually is doing that, and it’s just that my library is so ludicrously large that it still causes a problem.

But I know I’m not the only person with a huge library (probably others are even much larger than mine), who only ever wants to add items to the library from their iPhone, not their iPad or Mac. It seems that in those extreme cases, they could provide a “web-only” option.

Or, at least… let people know you can shit-can your whole Photos library on the iPad and just access it through the web if you really need to get to your photos.

Sure, you lose cool things like the “memories” widgets on the iPad OS home screen if you don’t have the library on-device, but it’s a trade-off that is not only acceptable, but necessary in a situation like mine.

Sometimes, in their effort to make tools easier to understand by limiting how much they explain what’s going on behind the scenes, Apple actually makes their tools harder to use.

Is Apple ever going to properly address the inevitable, relentless growth of peoples Photos libraries?

I just got a new MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, to replace my 3-year-old MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip. That older machine was fine, but, well… something in my gut just told me that if I was considering dropping two grand (minus some trade-in value) on a new computer manufactured in China, maybe I should do it before the end of 2024.

Anyway… I have the new MacBook Pro, and it’s pretty great. It’s essentially this year’s version of the same machine it’s replacing. The off-the-shelf model with a 14-inch display and a 512 GB SSD, at the same retail price. The upgrades are all in the Apple Silicon SoC: M4 Pro in place of the M1 Pro, with more cores and 50% more memory. A worthy upgrade to an already solid configuration.

I say “solid” because… well, I’d really like to have more disk space. I do a lot of video editing these days, and that requires a lot of storage. The problem is, Apple charges a ludicrous markup for increased disk capacity. And since external SSDs over Thunderbolt 5 are as fast as internal SSDs, I can get a 4 TB external disk for not much more than a meager 512 GB upgrade to Apple’s internal disk. The choice is obvious, even when weighing the convenience factor.

Which finally gets me (almost) to my point. Last night, after I had everything set up on the new Mac (I chose to manually install apps and copy files, so I could control what did and didn’t get moved over from the old Mac), I had over 300 GB of disk space free. This morning I sat down and was surprised to see I only had 180 GB free. What gives?

Well… what gives is the Photos app. I hadn’t even opened it — on purpose, for the exact reason I’m about to describe — but since I had logged into my iCloud account, the Mac “conveniently” automatically downloaded my entire Photos library from iCloud onto the Mac.

Do not want.

On my previous Mac, I had long since shuffled the Photos library off to an external disk. Honestly I never even really use Photos on my Mac, partly because my library is an unwieldy, 120 GB mess of close to 57,000 images¹. But mostly because Apple gives users (almost) no control over how the files are managed on their Macs:

So, basically, you have three options:

Fill up all of the space on your hard drive with your photo library.
Fill up all of the space on your hard drive with your photo library, until your Mac decides you’re running out of space, then let it decide how much space to free up.
Don’t have your photos on your Mac at all.

The default is #2, but it’s a pretty crappy option. Because for your Mac to know how much disk space to keep free, it needs to know how you intend to use it. If I’m not currently working on a video project, I don’t need much space. But if I am, then I can go from needing next to nothing to suddenly needing 200 GB or more of free space. Which means I always want to keep at least 200 GB free, in case I’m about to start on a video project. Once I’m rolling, I don’t want to be distracted with figuring out how to free up space.

Now here’s a twist: since, as I mentioned, external SSDs over Thunderbolt are essentially as fast as an internal SSD, you can easily edit a Final Cut project directly on an external disk. In fact, I do that a lot. But not always. I still want that free space.

Fortunately, Apple does provide a way to put your Photos library on an external disk. It’s easy and it works. But you shouldn’t have to do that.

The thing that really kills me is that it would be so simple for Apple to resolve this issue. All they’d need to do is add a slider to the settings tab from the screenshot above, letting the user set a minimum amount of disk space they want to keep free. Why doesn’t Apple do this? I feel like there’s a very intentional reason. And I think I’d be exasperated if I knew it.

¹ Apple is really to blame for the mushrooming library, too. Their automatic tagging by date and location, and AI-assisted tagging of subjects like individual people, pets, etc., make it so easy to find specific images that there is no incentive to put any effort into culling the junk from your library. Growing libraries lead you to pay for larger iCloud storage allocations to hold them. There’s a reason “Services” is Apple’s fastest growing revenue segment. But all of that aside — whatever, I really am not bothered by it — the one place Apple is completely shitting the bed on all of this is handling on-device storage.

In the studio

I just spent a couple of hours working on my newest track, the one that inspired the whole project in the first place: “Candor Stetson.” I’m not quite ready to reveal it to the world yet, but I did want to share these photos I took of my gear at the ready. (Note the pile of children’s instruments on the desk at the far left of the first photo… these will be used… soon…)

Sorry for the quality (or lack thereof) in these photos. The iPhone’s camera is adequate at best, less so when there’s a film of whatever’s in my pocket on the lens.

Now that’s really unfortunate… and gross…

But the question on my mind (besides “How is that guy not vomiting?”) is, “Why the hell were they hauling a whale carcass through the middle of a city on a flatbed truck?”

Found here via here.

But to prove that every cloud, or punctured whale carcass, has a silver lining (ugh… sorry… I don’t want that image either), a few clicks onward led me to this wonderment: a photographic compendium of audio cassettes. Now this is a dead technology, laughably inferior to what we almost take for granted today. But from about 1981 when I got my first little red portable tape recorder from Radio Shack, until 1998, when I got my first CD burner, cassettes were it, baby, and I probably went through thousands of blank cassettes from just about every available brand between the ages of 8 and 24. And if you can’t appreciate that, at least I’ve found someone who can.

OK, winter, we get it

I knew it was probably coming, so it wasn’t a total shock. But still… I woke up this morning to this:

Ugh. It will most likely have melted by noon, I suppose. Not that that will do much to repair my severely damaged psychological state.

Even worse, I’m annoyed that the default CSS for the new WordPress gallery functionality uses float: left so when there are only two images, it doesn’t center them, but leaves a nice, perfectly-sized void where a third photo would have gone. I’ll have to fix that. Speaking of voids, my annoyance (and distraction) at snow and CSS is somewhat compensated for by the smooth “electronic breakbeat jazz” grooves of Revolution Void.

Update, 8:13 AM: Great, now it’s actually snowing more. Take that, global warming! (Yes, please check out that site, if for no other reason than to prove that just because your URL is “globalwarming.org” doesn’t mean you’re a benevolent non-profit trying to save the world.)