To extend my statements from Twitter:
@thebriandunaway – once again, iPhone photos is a pain in my ass. Done taking photos with my iPhone and canceling iCloud service right now.
TL;DR; – iCloud is hammering my network and is a horrible service that I was forced into to save my photos from deletion.
Backstory:
Back in March 2015 At&T replaced my iPhone 5c after a buyout and upgrade of network services from Alltel Wireless in South Carolina. I migrated my data to my replacement iPhone 5c using the AT&T migration tool. No problems. iCloud services were turned off even though they were activated on my old phone. No worries, I lose my phone a lot and I need to turn on Find My Phone through iCloud.
I continue taking photos with my new iPhone just as I had always done for the past 2 years. After about a month I decided I would like to do something with some of the pictures so I plug the phone into my Windows PC and go to download photos as I have always done through Explorer and accessing the phone’s memory. But the iPhone never shows up in the My PC/My Computer area.
I spend time troubleshooting. Reading Apple forum posts. Googling. No luck. I’m not the only one. But every time someone asks they are shot down by some smart asses who tell them that they are doing something wrong despite a growing number of complaints from users. Why are you even on a forum thread if you have nothing valuable to add. I tried 2 other PCs to get the data off the phone. Same result.
Anyway, I figure the only way I am going to be able to stop wasting my time and get on with life is to use Apple’s iCloud service and download the pictures that way. So I go pay Apple their ransom to get my photos. Not only am I able to get the photos off of the iCloud website now but mysteriously the phone has shown back up in My Computer now. I didn’t change a thing except to pay for the iCloud service.
I have some theories on what happened. I am assuming since I exceeded my free iCloud storage space that the phone could no longer send photos to the cloud and the phone pestered me to upgrade my service. I started to just turn off the service on my phone several times but when I would go to turn it off it would pop up a warning about deleting all my photos not stored on the cloud. Well hells bells. I don’t want to lose all my photos. ‘
I figured my problems were over. Then my girlfriend who is on the same plan and has the same model 5c and used the same migration tool tells me she can no longer plug her phone in and get her photos from My Computer. So I tell her, “Don’t bother, just pay the ransom and save yourself the headache.” She did. Now she can plug in like before and her photos show up.
Fast forward a few months. Another Holiday hits. July 4th and being the photogs we are we start taking a ton of pics. A couple hundred probably.
After a busy day of partying and what not we come home and watch a little Netflix and forget about the pictures. We are watching Urban Cowoy for FilmSack podcast. It’s over 2 hours long. The movie is over and I decide to take a look at some of the pics we took. I avoid plugging my phone in since I have this new snazzy service called iCloud. Hmmm…2 photos show up on iCloud.com The 2 I shared earlier in the day. The other hundred or so are no where to be found. So I go about my business of checking my social media until it decides to catch up. But the internet is dog ass slow. I reset my router/modem a few times. I can’t go anywhere. Maybe that is why the photos aren’t uploading to the iCloud service. So I start going through my devices, I have a lot of wifi devices on my network. Turning them all off one at a time. Guess who. That’s right it was my iPhone and guess what service was the culprit. The iCloud service. It has no throttling. It just uses up all your upload bandwidth.
I live in a smallish town and I have 24M download and 1.5M upload…cause that is how it is. iCloud was causing a shit ton of collisions on my network disrupting both uploads/downloads and any traffic in between. We have been experiencing random internet issues for the past 2 months. That was about the time I “decided” to start using iCloud for photo storage. I just never put the 2 together until now. Wanna see more people with the same problem:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6992427
There ya go. Can you throttle the upload speed? Nope. Not unless you do it on the router level. What do a lot of “Not having problems thread dwellers” suggest? Call your internet provider and up your service plan. But I can’t. I am at the top level. Besides why the hell is it my internet providers problem to fix something that Apple needs to fix. Their service is broken. I have a shit ton of things running on my network and all of them are smart enough to not hammer my network and adjust to what I have.
I guess I will spend the rest of the day download pics to my local PC and canceling iCloud.
