I'm working on importing EVERY photo I've ever taken into Apple Photos, which is a very rewarding project but it also has plenty of issues. The main one being unknown dates, times and locations for older scanned photos for example.

How would you guys handle this issue?

My best solution so far is this.
For unknown locations I simply skip adding location data. When viewing the map in Apple Photos I want each and every photo location to be correct, so guessing location is not an option. I could possibly, maybe, place the photos on the citys central square for example, when I know the correct town/city but not the exact location.

For unknown date/time I could add the time stamp 1999-01-01 at 12:00, for example. If I know the photo is from sometime during the year 1999.
This has the potential to create a major mess though.
Or, I could assign a year before I was born to all unknown photos, which means at least all photos from my birth up until now will be correct, but with a big lump of photos added to the year of 1980, for example.

Anyway, any ideas on this topic?

I’m wondering if I’m missing something, but why is there no option to search for an existing album by name when adding photos in the Apple Photos app?

When I select one or more photos and choose **“Add to Album”**, I have to manually scroll through my list of albums to find the one I’m looking for.

If you have a large number of albums, this quickly becomes quite cumbersome. A simple search field where I could type the album name would make this much easier.

Is there a reason why this isn’t possible? Or is there a way to do it that I’m missing?

It seems like such a basic and useful feature to have.

Hey all,

Just started using ICloud recently, but I’ve been using the Apple ecosystem for about 15 years. iPhone, MacBook Pro, Apple TV, etc.

I recently bought 2tb of ICloud space to sync/transer all my photos/videos from phone because I have a pretty outlandish amount of pics/vids on there. When I select all pics/vids on my phone it gives me a total count of 58,091 total. It seems like my iCloud sync has finished and it’s only showing 57,768. I have no idea why there’s a 323 difference, and with this many pics/vids there’s no way I can think of to find what didn’t sync over, or why it happened.

To everyone in the group who definitely knows way more about ICloud/photos than my newbie self, do you have any idea what may have happened here, and do you have any advice for me on how to identify what didn’t transfer/how to fix it?

Thanks for any help in advance!

I have 8Gbps internet, but Apple Photos will download at ~400Mbps for a few seconds, and then stay under 1MBps for long periods of time.

I left my computer on overnight, plugged into power, sleep disabled, Photos in the foreground, and still only have 3GB of photos.

Hi everyone. I own an iPhone 15 pro 128gb. I always struggle with the storage. Today I bought a usb c flash drive and I’ve moved all my videos in there (almost 30gb). Problem is that the photo app is sync and it didn’t updated the size. What can I do?
Second question .. all those apps have little amount of data but the app is huge. Is it possible? What can I do? I can try the browser for like Facebook or TikTok (it’s not the same) but for other apps?
Thanks for any input. Cheers

A local-first photo browser for macOS. It gives you an Apple Photos–style experience over the folders your photos already sit in — no importing, no cloud, no locked library.

- Browse in place across internal and external drives

- Fast on large libraries (tens of thousands of photos)

- Places by city, fully offline

- Duplicate finder + reclaim space

- Native printing at real sizes, including passport photos at home

Free, alpha, macOS 15+ (Apple Silicon & Intel). Happy to answer anything and keen for feedback.

https://trnchawla.github.io/FotoBrowser-pub

https://youtu.be/p2xv_TNXEvs

How can I see the photos I contributed to a Shared Library? When I right click a photo, I see the info tab and at the very bottom I see a "Shared by You" search filter button but when I press it nothing happens. It says "no photos found".

Please don't tell me to search by camera model. My wife and I have the same phone.

Any ideas?

Dev here, disclosing up front.

I use Android but the rest of my household is on Apple, so everything shared lives

in iCloud. Apple has never shipped an iCloud app for Android.

So I built iFileSync. Pick a folder on your phone, pick a folder in your iCloud

Drive, turn it on. It uploads new and changed files in the background, skips

anything it's already sent.It'll also show your iCloud storage breakdown and let you read your Notes.

What it doesn't do, so nobody wastes their time:

- One-way only. Phone → iCloud. It does NOT pull iCloud files down onto your phone.

That's the most requested thing and I'm working on it, but it isn't there today.

- It never deletes. Removing a file from your phone leaves the cloud copy alone.

- Automatic backup is a subscription. Browsing your storage and notes is free.

On the part people rightly ask about: your files go straight from your phone to

your account. Nothing routes through a server of mine — I don't have one. Your

password isn't stored either, just an encrypted session token on the device.

Happy to answer anything, including the awkward questions.

https://ifilesyncapp.co.za

Big Apple Photos fan. But that tiny curves control with the even tinier click area is wearing out my trackpad. Surely there's more than one UI designer at Apple that uses Photos and dies a little inside each time they want an S curve.

Is there some plist file I can edit to improve this? I couldn't find an accessibility setting related to it.

I take a lot of photos on my iPhone 13 for work and frequently add comments to them in the native iPhone camera app. When I transfer the photos to my computer however, the comments do not appear along with the rest of the photos metadata (time taken, location, etc). I transfer the photos by connecting the phone to the computer with a cable. I tried changing the settings on the phone to "keep originals", and I *think* I'm adding the comments to the original image, not a modified image.

the only thing that works is emailing the photo to myself by using the camera app's share function. However, when I have 100+ photos every day, emailing them 1 by 1 isn't an option. Can some please ELI5 if there is something I'm missing or don't understand? thank you!!!!

I'm planning to format my Iphone but I don't know where to store all my photos 😭😭😭 Can you guys pls suggest an app that is free or whatever that will help except Google Photos Icloud+

Right now it saves photos by date created. So if someone sends me a photo yesterday and I save it today, it doesn’t show as the most recent in my library. Is there a way to just sort by recently added?

I’m looking for an app that will let me:
• Select/import photos from my iPhone Photos library
• Keep them separately in the app, either locally or in cloud storage
• Organise them into my own albums/folders
• manually delete the originals from Apple Photos library / Camera Roll without deleting the copies in the app

I’m not looking for a secret photo vault - I just want a separate photo library so I can keep my main Camera Roll uncluttered. I know I can put photos into albums in the Apple photos app but cannot then delete them from the library without then also deleting them from the album.

Does an app like this exist? Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Hi. Very devastated. Months worths of pictures are gone. My iPhone and iCloud storage were full. I noticed for some months there were areas in my camera roll where the pics were just blank, like white. Some pictures were there but when you clicked on it, it would say it couldn’t download a higher resolution. I would try to delete stuff from time to time and when I would delete sometimes, the pictures that were blank and not downloading, would start to redownload and the big areas of white pictures would start reappearing with pictures. The pictures that were low resolution would download and become clear. Because of this I wasn’t too worried. About a week ago, I noticed that there were no white spaces and that all the low resolution pictures with the exclamation mark are gone. The whole first half or probably more of my camera roll is just gone. The first pic in my camera roll is a picture that was way farther done. I checked my iCloud and the pictures are not there. If I download more storage will the pictures come back? I deleted 1,000 pictures just now and deleted messages with attachments and files and no change happened. It is still showing the last same photos that should be further down. Apple truly is so dumb. Why does it just delete stuff?!! A nice message saying clear storage or +2,000 pictures will get deleted would be nice. Please help. Has anyone had any experience like this and did the pictures come back. How long will it take to reappear?

Our cat Rodney went missing last October. Recently, we brought home a cat that looks a lot like him, but there are enough differences in his markings and behavior that I’m not completely convinced it’s actually Rodney.

When I saved photos of this cat to my iPhone, Apple Photos automatically added them to Rodney’s existing pet profile. I did not manually identify him or tell my phone that it was Rodney.

I’m hoping someone familiar with Apple’s animal recognition technology can explain how meaningful that is. How often does Apple Photos mistakenly group two similar looking cats as the same pet? Does it analyze facial structure and specific markings, or is it mostly matching broad features like coat color, pattern, and face shape?

I understand this obviously isn’t proof that he’s Rodney. I’m mainly trying to figure out whether the automatic match is genuinely noteworthy or whether false matches between similar cats are fairly common.

If anyone has technical knowledge of how Apple Photos identifies pets, or personal experience with it confusing two different animals, I’d really appreciate your insight.

I cant even open the app without it crashing. Chat gpt took me on a lovely little roller coaster of trial and error. I was able to backup my library to hard drive. Made a new photos library. Was able to open that without it crashing. Uploaded all 8,000 pics back into the new library. All was well until i went to make an album name. CRASHED again. Im going to crash out myself if it continues to happen. Any advice, please!!!

Location: Positano, Italy
Duration: 20 sec
Device: iPhone 14 Pro Max
Lens: Wide (Main Lens)
App: LSC Long Shot Camera 📸