"Photos" Catastrophe

[PHILIP TOMLINSON]

Dear Friends I really need advice.

This morning I tried to open “Photos” on my iMac and, although its name appears on the menu bar, no screen appears. If I click on “photos” in the “window” menu, a screen does appear but it is blank and empty. Most of the other menu items are greyed out.

Several things that I did recemtly may possibly have a bearing on this awful, terrible event:-

1. I installed “BeetleCam” duplicate cleaner first on my iPad, then on my Mac and used it a couple of times. All seemed well. 

2. I purchased some file space on Google Photos and backed up all of my pictures in Photos onto it. It finished backing up yesterday. All seemed well. This morning Photos is empty!!!

I still have all my pictures in the iOS version of Photos on my iPad, thank God, but I worry that if I sync my iPad with my iMac, they too will disappear…. All my pictures are available on Google’s “Photos” but the quality isn’t as good as on Mac Photos. 

I want my Photos back!!

Phil

[Stephen Watson]

Ooooo errrrrr.

I'd start by logging into your iCloud account and seeing what photos are in there - if they all appear then I'd think that your Photos are safely on Apple's servers. If you start photos with the alt/option key down it asks if you want to rebuild your Mac Photos library so I suppose you could try that.

When I used the iCloud Photo Library I loaded up everything from my Mac photos onto iCloud, which took about a week. Then  switched it on on my iPad and I asked if I wanted to merge my pics as I still had some in the iPad's camera roll that weren't in iCloud. I said yes to that and they were added to the pot and now they're all on iCloud and iPad.

I'm sure others will have sensible suggestions. :-)

Stephen

We are Costa of Borg. We will add your vibrancy and distinctiveness to our own. Your town and your customers will service us. Resistance is futile.

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[PHILIP TOMLINSON]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your advice. I never ticked the option to upload all my photos onto iCloud, just the "Photo Stream". I have a lot of photos (6,783) and didn't want to pay for extra storage.

Actually I can now access my photos in "Photos"again but I don't feel that I completely understand what's happened. Mac "Photos" seems to work again if "Google Photos" app is live on my menu bar. Do you think that the Google app has relocated all the files of my photos? If I look at Photos Library on my Mac it shows 37.08 GB used.

Phil

[itsa...@icloud.com]

I’m obviously running my own reality here! Sorry for reading what you’d not written ...

I had over 10,000 photos and felt that 79p a month to fit them in to iCloud was worth it and so far I really love being able to browse all my photos on my iPad. However, I digress …

I wonder if you moved, rather than copied, the photos onto the Google drive and somehow Photos is left with aliases to the originals and if Google Photos app isn’t live then the originals are no longer accessible. I’m guessing here as I’ve never even looked at Google Photos!

One thing that may shed some light is to launch Photos, select a photo and then click on your File menu. If the menu item “Show Referenced File in Finder” is black then Photos contains aliases to photos stored elsewhere whereas if it’s greyed out then the Photo is stashed in Photos’ library.

Stephen

"This [Assange] episode teaches some lessons. Essential among them is the fact that analysis in the corporate media is now crippled beyond repair, its credibility a smoking wreck.” ~ Simon Wood, daily99998271.blogspot.jp

[Jason Davies]

I'm going to sound grumpy and reactionary, because I'm being
risk-averse. It doesn't mean I'm wrong though!

Photos.app is a disaster. I've lost and had duplicated hundreds of
photos. It's only my paranoid set-up that means I think I've retrieved
them. I'm in the middle of moving all my 90gigs of photos and videos to
Devonthink Pro, saved on Dropbox and in Time Machine, and using Photos
*only* for photo stream-like activity. I would go so far as to say if
you can't see a problem, you should look more closely. Because I'm
having to effectively recreate the old iPhoto set-up, tags etc, and
check for duplicates and missing photos, it's taking absolutely forever.

It's a shame there aren't really any alternatives that do something
similar; as you said Google seems to compress them. I strongly recommend
that you keep an eye on your photos and Photos and ensure you put copies
of the really important ones somewhere else, eg dropbox camera upload
(if you clear it out regularly, but let TM archive them, they're
retrievable. Dropbox also dates them in the name so that helps relocate
them later).





On 9 Feb 2016, at 14:09, PHILIP TOMLINSON wrote:

> Hi Stephen,Thanks for your advice. I never ticked the option to upload

> all my photos onto iCloud, just the "Photo Stream". I have a lot of

> photos (6,783) and didn't want to pay for extra storage.Actually I can

> Dear Friends I really need advice.This morning I tried to open

> “Photos” on my iMac and, although its name appears on the menu
> bar, no screen appears. If I click on “photos” in the “window”
> menu, a screen does appear but it is blank and empty. Most of the

> other menu items are greyed out.Several things that I did recemtly may
> possibly have a bearing on this awful, terrible event:-1. I installed

> “BeetleCam” duplicate cleaner first on my iPad, then on my Mac and
> used it a couple of times. All seemed well. 2. I purchased some file
> space on Google Photos and backed up all of my pictures in Photos onto
> it. It finished backing up yesterday. All seemed well. This morning

> Photos is empty!!!I still have all my pictures in the iOS version of

> To post to this group, send an email to sm...@googlegroups.com.

[mac98aop]

I still haven't updated to ElCap but am edging closer.

I too have an enormous photo library and Photos.app scares me!

Where are all these duplicates coming from?

Is it widely experienced or are there certain setups/configs that make it happen?

AP

[PHILIP TOMLINSON]

I started to get duplicates on transferring to El Capitan and the new Photos. I imagined that it's because I haven't selected some option or other. I haven't discovered the tick box yet though. I bought the app Beetle Cam to deal with the duplicates because it was taking me a ridiculous amount of time to delete them manually. Beetle Cam seems to do the job very well and gives you time to retrieve deleted photos in case you've made the wrong decision.

However, El C is making my old iMac very slow. I'm saving up and deciding which mac to buy next!

Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

El Cap always slows down Macs without an SSD. You could install one into your iMac for a fraction of the cost of a new Mac

Regards

Sam

MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development Sam Mullen ACMT +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.co.uk www.macambulance.co.uk MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

[mac98aop]

Sam, I realise that SSDs are inherently faster than standard HDD, but I wonder if there's anything specific about El Cap compared to prior OS prior versions and the way it reads/writes files, that makes this so?

Thanks

On Tuesday, February 9, 2016 at 11:44:57 AM UTC, Phil Tomlinson wrote:

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

I would imagine Apple haven’t optimised for spinning disks at all, given that all their Macs bar the 13” MacBook Pro and base 21.5” iMac have a flash drive as standard. The 21.5” iMac 4K with basic 5400rpm drive is woefully slow for a new Mac, it’s useless without the Fusion Drive.

Even Yosemite was noticeably slower on an HD than Mavericks. The software gets more complicated and makes higher demands of the drive, HDs don’t react well under heavy load, SSDs fare much better.

Regards

Sam

MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development Sam Mullen ACMT +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.co.uk www.macambulance.co.uk MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

[mac98aop]

That's really helpful, thanks Sam.

It's also a little disappointing as whilst I don't begrudge any firm wanting to make profits, it seems we are in an Apple era where it's so easy to simply recommend any of their products depending on one's needs.

Now, the spec might also let someone down. Ok, it'd work, but that 21.5" iMac being "woefully" slow just sounds a shame!

Anyway, as someone who heeded your advice and slipped an SSD into my Early 2011 MBPro, this thing runs like greased lightning (with Mavericks), so no complaints this end.

Adam

On Tuesday, February 9, 2016 at 11:44:57 AM UTC, Phil Tomlinson wrote:

[mac98aop]

Apologies that the typos and grammar in my last post, made it completely incomprehensible.

But, it's Friday afternoon, and I know what I meant, so....

;)

[itsa...@icloud.com]

Sam, if I was to lug my Mid-2011 21.5” 500GB iMac down to Brighton sometime, how much would it cost to replace its drive with a swanky SSD?

I’m very pleased with my iMac otherwise but it’s getting slower. iDefrag certainly helped, no doubt there, but each time I use my partner’s MacBook Air it reminds me how slow my iMac is.

AND

I had pretty much all my photos in Aperture and I’m now using Photos with iCloud Library. For me it’s worked very well and so far no lost photos, no duplicates (apart from image versions from Aperture, or at least that’s what I think it is …) That’s my experience, sadly yours doesn’t sound so good. :-(

Stephen

"This [Assange] episode teaches some lessons. Essential among them is the fact that analysis in the corporate media is now crippled beyond repair, its credibility a smoking wreck.” ~ Simon Wood, daily99998271.blogspot.jp

[andrew lancaster]

I REALLY don't like "photos". With iPhoto I could find collections and groups of photos that I wanted.

Now, I have thousands, many of them duplicates, and not in any organised or logical arrangement. Almost as though they'd just been thrown in a heap, mixed up and dumped back randomly. No time sequence, nothing I can sort out.

Is it possible to go back to iPhoto?

Andrew



Sent from my iPhone

[Stephen Watson]

I'm fairly sure that Aperture, iPhoto and Photos all share the same library - up to a point. I seem to remember that changes made in Photos will not appear in iPhoto and vice versa but you should be able to ignore Photos and start again from whatever iPhoto shows you.

I haven't used iPhoto since I started with Aperture and I'm fairly sure that that's how it worked with Aperture.

Stephen

We are Costa of Borg. We will add your vibrancy and distinctiveness to our own. Your town and your customers will service us. Resistance is futile.

[andrew lancaster]

Is Aperture still current? If so I may well change allegiance and start using that!

Andrew

Sent from my iPhone

[andrew lancaster]

I'd be interested in this too - mine seems very slow compared to how I think I remember it. 

Sent from my iPhone

[Adam Pymble]

Just to reiterate that I took Sam's advice and the SSD swap is like getting a brand new machine. 

Get as big as you can afford and you won't look back. 

As and when I do need to upgrade the whole machine, it'll never be anything than an SSD for me. 

Sent on the move. 

Apologies for any typos and brevity. 

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[Stephen Watson]

Aperture still works fine on El Capitan but it's no longer available to buy as far as I know.  I used to have a disk for V2 I think but that may not run on El Capitan. V3 was the last version is it was Mac App Store only.

Stephen

We are Costa of Borg. We will add your vibrancy and distinctiveness to our own. Your town and your customers will service us. Resistance is futile.

[PHILIP TOMLINSON]

A very interesting thread here - My problems with Photos are reasonably well solved, but I'm very interested in the SSD possibility. Would it be a fix for my old iMac that only has space for 4GB of memory? (20 inch mid 2007, 2.4 GHz core duo processor). It's one of those earlier iMacs with a black plastic back and I have loved it but it is faltering quite upsettingly with El Capitan...

Phil

Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

It would make a huge difference yes. Will fit fine with a bit of heat-resistant adhesive.

Regards

Sam

MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development Sam Mullen ACMT +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.co.uk www.macambulance.co.uk MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

[ARMS]

Very interesting thread which I have been following with interest as I have the same problem. I would love to find a safe alternative to the apple, disaster, software. If anyone comes across anything please share. I would be more than happy to manually move my photos periodically to a sensible storage solution on my own computer, not some misty cloud in cyberspace. A few years ago I lost a whole bunch of photos because of the way they constantly chop and change. Why do they complicate something which should be simple?

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

I would say a time machine backup to an external drive, then a regular clone to another drive would suffice. You can also back up via time machine to multiple drive quite easily.

Regards

Sam

MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development Sam Mullen ACMT +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.co.uk www.macambulance.co.uk MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

On 14 Feb 2016, at 08:16, ARMS <arms...@mac.com> wrote:

Very interesting thread which I have been following with interest as I have the same problem. I would love to find a safe alternative to the apple, disaster, software. If anyone comes across anything please share. I would be more than happy to manually move my photos periodically to a sensible storage solution on my own computer, not some misty cloud in cyberspace. A few years ago I lost a whole bunch of photos because of the way they constantly chop and change. Why do they complicate something which should be simple?

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[Stephen Watson]

Do remember that if you use Photos with no iCloud Photo Library then everything is stored on your Mac. If you do switch on iCloud photo library you can choose the location of the master images - mine are all on my Mac and then copied to other devices.

This is irrelevant if you don't want to use Apple's software of course!

Stephen

We are Costa of Borg. We will add your vibrancy and distinctiveness to our own. Your town and your customers will service us. Resistance is futile.

On 14 Feb 2016, at 08:16, ARMS <arms...@mac.com> wrote:

[Jason P. Davies]

None of which helps with the fact that it duplicates any photos that have downloaded to the phone (but only a random selection)...

cheers,

-Jason
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Sent from my iPhone
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