[4ad]

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]

Not aware of those issues, what exactly are the limitations?

[4ad]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299

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

[gumby]

That’s dreadful! I had assumed that iCloud (rather than Dropbox) sharing would share the original as that is already in the cloud anyway. It would just be a pointer or DB entry

I was horrified when I learned that Google wasn’t going to save full resolution by default. Had no idea Apple would do something similar.

[snuxoll]

That's what I thought myself, but then I realized pictures put into shared albums are actually copied - you can delete the original and it's still available in the shared album, at 0 cost to your iCloud storage.

It's kind of a nice feature, but at the same time it makes doing things like collecting photos from my wife for a photo book annoying.

[hmage]

Don't confuse storage and sharing.

You still have full resolution originals without any recompression in iCloud Photo Library.

[AlphaSite]

It’s full res for your photos, but it won’t share that publicly.

[aneidon]

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]

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]

> 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.

[Terretta]

FWIW, all these reasons are why I pay Flickr.

I attempted over the years to use the various incarnations of Google's photos but they consistently mangled pictures, canceled / renamed / migrated services, bungled who gets to see what under what Google Accounts, etc., until I was browbeaten into conceding defeat.

I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong. So unless you fix the metadata, the only sort you can have is manual.

Note: If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again? What's the use case? Throwaways? You're making on average a new album every 3 days, which still seems a little awkward. And innumerably more shared with you, means, what, 10 albums shared with you a day? It's amazing you have time for detailed and thoughtful HN comments. You should switch to pictures, they're worth a thousand words.

[zeusk]

> 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).

What problems do you have with Google Photos on iOS, macOS? I use it regularly with web (windows, macOS) and my android, iOS devices and have no major complaints. For me, it's by far the best photos solution there is.

[zeusk]

> as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices.

Which is why we have UTC.

> The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones

See UTC.

> or out of order by minutes for individual devices.

which is alright, compared to the sort by time added to album.

[Terretta]

Yep. I've seen UTC.

And I'm invariably the only geek whose photos are timestamped in UTC because I set devices that way (except for phones which I can't), or who knows that the metadata doesn't even record the TZ until a recent EXIF standard update, 2.31 released last fall, added support.

Wikipedia still says "There is no way to record time-zone information along with the time, thus rendering the stored time ambiguous." It'll be a while for cameras to catch up.

[lloeki]

> When shared, photos taken with standard point-and-shoot cameras, SLR cameras, or iOS devices have up to 2048 pixels on the long edge.

Wow, what a deal breaker. I always felt like something was off quality-wise but never took the time to delve into that.

[4ad]

Yeah, and it doesn't make any sense as they already have the pictures in the original quality stored on their servers already.

I think (but I am not sure) you can use iCloud Photo sharing even if you don't use iCloud Photo library, but that's a special case. Then you could limit the quality of those photos, I guess. But why degrade the quality of photos that you already have? Sharing doesn't use any extra space than non-sharing. They are in the cloud anyway.

[snowwindwaves]

I live in Canada and am born in the early 80s. 1 in 20 of my friends has a phone that isn't an iPhone, we often use iCloud photo sharing for albums but I don't know anyone who is using iCloud Photo Library, so not a special case in my circle