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The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. Currently they’re

The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. Currently they’re all but useless for something like a shared album from a vacation, because it groups photos by when family members upload them. I tend to upload photos at the end of each day, but other family members who were shooting on a normal camera waited until the end of the trip to upload their photos. The end result is that photos that should be appearing next to each other instead show up at opposite ends of the album. Infuriating.

4ad 9y ago
I'll settle for when shared iCloud albums support a decent size and resolution. iCloud Photos is frustratingly bad, but I don't want to buy into other cloud ecosystem, like Google's. Does anybody know if it's possible to replicate the integration with Photos on both iOS and macOS, so I could write my own sync thing?
- aneidon 9y ago
  Not aware of those issues, what exactly are the limitations?
  - 4ad 9y ago
    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786 Some highlights: > When shared, photos taken with standard point-and-shoot cameras, SLR cameras, or iOS devices have up to 2048 pixels on the long edge. > Videos can be up to five minutes in length and are delivered at up to 720p resolution. > Maximum shared albums an owner can share: 100 > Maximum shared albums a user can subscribe to: 100 > Maximum number of photos and videos from a single contributor across all shared albums, per hour: 1000
    - aneidon 9y ago
      Ugh, wasn’t aware of that. That plus my annoyances with the sorting will definitely make me reconsider using the shared albums as the primary way of sharing family photos.
      - Terretta 9y ago
        Serious question: What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos, and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour" (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)? Agree with you on the time ordering. If people want a particular order, they could upload in that order. If they want time ordered, they could tap a button to refresh sort by time taken. However, and this is a big gotcha -- you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones, or out of order by minutes for individual devices. What Apple could do is recognize contributors and devices in a shared album and let you assign an offset to each contributor plus device pairing, then sequence these all sensibly. What I do is have a inbox type album for everyone during and following the trip, then import, sort and select and manually fix time offsets (if I remember, I have everyone take the same photo of the same phone clock at the same moment to make this easier), then re-order and curate to taste, then re-publish.
        4ad 9y ago
        > What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos. 100 albums is nothing. Looking at my photo share history (on Google+, not iCloud as iCloud is useless) I have about 500 albums shared with friends and family over the last five years. And of course, there have been innumerably more albums shared with me, while iCloud limits that too to only 100 albums. The best thing about these Google+ albums is that I don't even have to give them a name, unlike iCloud shared albums. > and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour" It's easy, I don't share photos every day, I share them e.g. at the end of a holiday, and then there are more than a thousand. In any case I might need to share even more, since I might share the same pictures to different people in different albums, and that counts multiple times. Of course this is all moot, since the quality is degraded too much to use this service anyway. > (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)? It doesn't rate limit, is blocks you out and it tells you to try again in an hour. I have to remember to do that and I have to remember where it errored out. It takes forever to do something that should take seconds. They already have all my pictures stored in iCloud. They are already there! "Sharing" doesn't consume resources, it's just an entry in a database referencing data they already have. Which, btw, means that they should not have to reduce the photo quality. They already keep my high quality data, and I pay for this storage. Reencoding into lower quality actually increases the storage they have to use for my data. I suspect iCloud Photos and iCloud Photo sharing are two completely disconnected services at Apple that don't communicate properly. > you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones Erm, no, because you sort by actual physical time keeping track of time zone and everything? I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day). Good model, fast, and no artificial limitations. I wish Apple would keep up.
petercooper 9y ago
The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. I remember the 10.2-10.6 releases and just how significant they were and it feels like rearranging deck chairs in comparison nowadays.
- aneidon 9y ago
  Just to clarify, I’m very excited overall for the update, although of course it is lots of under-the-hood stuff. When I wrote biggest I meant the biggest feature I’m not sure will be launching with the update.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. There's a whole new FS that went into production in something like 4-5 years (unheard of) among lots of over things...
  - johnbellone 9y ago
    I am very skeptical of a new filesystem that is going out to users that fast. I haven’t tested the beta yet, but I would imagine we still have the option of using HFS+? Otherwise I’ll wait six months or more to even attempt it.
    - AsyncAwait 9y ago
      I hear you, but the FS has been silently deployed to millions of iOS devices already, so I'd imagine it's pretty well tested for them to bet customer data on it. I also haven't had any issues with APFS on 10.13 beta, but I haven't used it in any fancy way yet.
    - lvillani 9y ago
      If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install. Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.
kiliankoe 9y ago
I submitted a radar for this last year or the one before, it was closed as a dupe, so there's at least two people Apple knows that want this feature^^
mikeytown2 9y ago
Switch to Google Photos[1]; it's amazing. I'm always a little worried about what they are doing with all the data though... [1] https://photos.google.com/ https://photos.google.com/
roymurdock 9y ago
Workaround: download the photos to your local storage and create a new album with them, you can then sort them correctly by date taken. Can delete the original and reshare if others want access to the photos in chronologically taken order.

4ad 9y ago

I'll settle for when shared iCloud albums support a decent size and resolution. iCloud Photos is frustratingly bad, but I don't want to buy into other cloud ecosystem, like Google's. Does anybody know if it's possible to replicate the integration with Photos on both iOS and macOS, so I could write my own sync thing?

aneidon 9y ago
Not aware of those issues, what exactly are the limitations?
- 4ad 9y ago
  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786 Some highlights: > When shared, photos taken with standard point-and-shoot cameras, SLR cameras, or iOS devices have up to 2048 pixels on the long edge. > Videos can be up to five minutes in length and are delivered at up to 720p resolution. > Maximum shared albums an owner can share: 100 > Maximum shared albums a user can subscribe to: 100 > Maximum number of photos and videos from a single contributor across all shared albums, per hour: 1000
  - aneidon 9y ago
    Ugh, wasn’t aware of that. That plus my annoyances with the sorting will definitely make me reconsider using the shared albums as the primary way of sharing family photos.
    - Terretta 9y ago
      Serious question: What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos, and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour" (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)? Agree with you on the time ordering. If people want a particular order, they could upload in that order. If they want time ordered, they could tap a button to refresh sort by time taken. However, and this is a big gotcha -- you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones, or out of order by minutes for individual devices. What Apple could do is recognize contributors and devices in a shared album and let you assign an offset to each contributor plus device pairing, then sequence these all sensibly. What I do is have a inbox type album for everyone during and following the trip, then import, sort and select and manually fix time offsets (if I remember, I have everyone take the same photo of the same phone clock at the same moment to make this easier), then re-order and curate to taste, then re-publish.
      - 4ad 9y ago
        > What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos. 100 albums is nothing. Looking at my photo share history (on Google+, not iCloud as iCloud is useless) I have about 500 albums shared with friends and family over the last five years. And of course, there have been innumerably more albums shared with me, while iCloud limits that too to only 100 albums. The best thing about these Google+ albums is that I don't even have to give them a name, unlike iCloud shared albums. > and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour" It's easy, I don't share photos every day, I share them e.g. at the end of a holiday, and then there are more than a thousand. In any case I might need to share even more, since I might share the same pictures to different people in different albums, and that counts multiple times. Of course this is all moot, since the quality is degraded too much to use this service anyway. > (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)? It doesn't rate limit, is blocks you out and it tells you to try again in an hour. I have to remember to do that and I have to remember where it errored out. It takes forever to do something that should take seconds. They already have all my pictures stored in iCloud. They are already there! "Sharing" doesn't consume resources, it's just an entry in a database referencing data they already have. Which, btw, means that they should not have to reduce the photo quality. They already keep my high quality data, and I pay for this storage. Reencoding into lower quality actually increases the storage they have to use for my data. I suspect iCloud Photos and iCloud Photo sharing are two completely disconnected services at Apple that don't communicate properly. > you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones Erm, no, because you sort by actual physical time keeping track of time zone and everything? I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day). Good model, fast, and no artificial limitations. I wish Apple would keep up.

petercooper 9y ago

The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. I remember the 10.2-10.6 releases and just how significant they were and it feels like rearranging deck chairs in comparison nowadays.

aneidon 9y ago
Just to clarify, I’m very excited overall for the update, although of course it is lots of under-the-hood stuff. When I wrote biggest I meant the biggest feature I’m not sure will be launching with the update.
coldtea 9y ago
>This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. There's a whole new FS that went into production in something like 4-5 years (unheard of) among lots of over things...
- johnbellone 9y ago
  I am very skeptical of a new filesystem that is going out to users that fast. I haven’t tested the beta yet, but I would imagine we still have the option of using HFS+? Otherwise I’ll wait six months or more to even attempt it.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    I hear you, but the FS has been silently deployed to millions of iOS devices already, so I'd imagine it's pretty well tested for them to bet customer data on it. I also haven't had any issues with APFS on 10.13 beta, but I haven't used it in any fancy way yet.
  - lvillani 9y ago
    If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install. Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.

kiliankoe 9y ago

I submitted a radar for this last year or the one before, it was closed as a dupe, so there's at least two people Apple knows that want this feature^^

mikeytown2 9y ago

Switch to Google Photos[1]; it's amazing. I'm always a little worried about what they are doing with all the data though... [1] https://photos.google.com/ https://photos.google.com/

roymurdock 9y ago

Workaround: download the photos to your local storage and create a new album with them, you can then sort them correctly by date taken. Can delete the original and reshare if others want access to the photos in chronologically taken order.