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   More Problems with iCloud Photo Library Uploads

   Adam C. Engst

   The largely opaque combination of Photos and iCloud Photo Library is
   out of control. I can't guarantee these issues will apply to everyone,
   but consider yourself warned.

   I recently wrote about how enabling iCloud Photo Library causes Photos
   to monopolize your Internet connection as it uploads your photos to
   iCloud, and I offered a way to mitigate the annoyance (see '[1]How to
   Throttle iCloud Photo Library Uploads,' 20 May 2015). It took over a
   week for my 27,000+ photos to upload, and that's using an Internet
   connection with 5 Mbps of upstream bandwidth, throttled to 3.5 Mbps.

   Luckily, unlike many people, I don't have a data cap for my Time Warner
   Internet connection, so at least that wasn't a problem for me, as it
   might be for you. Where I did run into trouble is with my iPhone, on
   which I'm using the Optimize iPhone Storage option to reduce the amount
   of data transferred and stored. Tonya, Tristan, and I now share 2 GB of
   data on our family plan, and before last month, we had never come close
   to using that much, since we're still accustomed to having only 250 MB
   each. So you can imagine my surprise shortly after I enabled iCloud
   Photo Library when AT&T texted me to say that I was approaching my 2 GB
   limit. I looked through the cellular data usage screen in Settings >
   Cellular, and pored over the app-specific information in [2]Dataman
   Pro, but all I was able to determine was that lots of data had been
   used in the Documents & Sync category of System Services.

   There are no settings to prevent iCloud Photo Library from working over
   cellular, and while I disabled cellular data for the Photos app, that
   made no difference. I could turn off cellular data in general (and I
   did once or twice, but that's a hard thing to remember every time you
   leave the house), but by the end of the billing period, AT&T had hit me
   with $30 of overage charges for two $15 blocks of 1 GB of additional
   data.

   This is shockingly poor design on Apple's part, and I hope to see it
   fixed in iOS 9. The entire point of iCloud Photo Library is to transfer
   huge quantities of image data, and it's disrespectful for Apple not to
   provide a switch to prevent iCloud Photo Library from chewing through
   cellular data.

   Nevertheless, I wrote the $30 off as a one-time expense, figuring it
   would never happen again. But now I'm worried that iCloud Photo Library
   could be a significant recurring expense, not to mention the time
   babysitting iCloud Photo Library uploads on my Mac.

   A question was recently posed on the discussion page for the iCloud
   chapter of Jason Snell's massively popular '[3]Photos for Mac: A Take
   Control Crash Course,' asking if repairing the Photos library (by
   holding down Command-Option at launch) would force everything to be
   uploaded to iCloud Photo Library again.

   I couldn't imagine that this would be the case, and said so initially
   in my reply while I was waiting for my test repair to finish. And when
   I looked at the iCloud pane of Photos' preferences window at first,
   there was no notable activity. A few minutes later, though, I looked
   back, and it said that it was uploading 27,552 items. Not good.
   However, some apps, like CrashPlan, report that they're doing more than
   they are, because they're actually analyzing the data, not uploading,
   and they eventually realize that no new data needs to be uploaded; I
   hoped briefly that this was the case here too.

   Unfortunately, when I looked at the Network view in Activity Monitor,
   the nsurlsessiond process had clearly started sending a large quantity
   of data. And some spelunking in Console revealed this log entry:

   6/19/15 11:06:56.470 AM cloudphotosd[29598]: Reset Sync Requested!
   Reason: Database was rebuilt

   [4][tn_Activity-Monitor-nsurlsessiond.jpg]

   What's unclear right now is how much data is being uploaded again. My
   sense is that Photos isn't uploading everything, despite the several
   gigabytes of data that it has already uploaded, because the count of
   items left to upload has dropped faster than I'd expect, down to 21,183
   items as of the screenshot above.

   I'll know more in a day or so; it's conceivable that Photos restarted
   its upload with the oldest and thus smallest photos, unlike the initial
   upload, which seemed to start with the newest first. What I'm most
   concerned about is if my iPhone feels the need to download gigabytes of
   data again while I'm away from Wi-Fi. I haven't caught it downloading
   anything significant yet in Dataman (which can also watch Wi-Fi
   transfers), but iOS is slippery.

   For now, then, the takeaway message is that you shouldn't repair your
   Photos library unless necessary, particularly if you use iCloud Photo
   Library, since doing so may trigger a bandwidth-hogging upload.

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/article/15679
   2. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dataman-pro-smart-way-to-manage/id807571009?mt=8&at=10l5PW
   3. http://tid.bl.it/photos-crash-course-tidbits
   4. http://tidbits.com/resources/2015-06/Activity-Monitor-nsurlsessiond.png

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