Unable To Download Icloud Photos
Peggy Schatz
The only workaround I've found is giving up on Linked Albums (you know, the feature that we purchased three of these devices for) and I manually create "Playlists" instead, then manually select and upload all the photos from my iCloud Photos album to the Playlist.
I've just created a new playlist in the Meural app and added 64 photos from a new iCloud Shared Album I am a member of. All 64 photos uploaded to the playlist fine. Added another 100 in two phases from two other shared libraries, one of which was my own iCloud shared library, the other was a family member who shared to me - all photos are showing in "All Uploads" under "Your Library" and the new playlist is showing all 164 photos, albeit not in the order they appear in the original shared albums, so they are not in any apparent sequence - possibly by their original time stamp. Anyway they are all in the Meural library and have started to display on my canvas after clicking "send" and display in what appears to be a random order rather than sequentially as they appear in their original iCloud albums, but this is what I prefer.
I have not tried linking to an iCloud album and then adding photos to the iCloud album to see if these additions then automatically sync to the Meural playlist. I will have a play with that feature some time and report back.
Now this is quirky: I have many iCloud shared albums, a mix of my own that I have shared to others and some that others have shared to me. However, there is one specific shared album where trying to add a batch of photos into the Meural playlist fails with a message "some items failed to upload" - on investigation, none of them uploaded. Repeating for just a single photo also fails. Adding a single or multiple photos from any other shared iCloud album or my own non shared photos in iCloud works fine, so there is no image limit in my Meural playlist that I have reached and hitting. I tried restarting the Meural app, but get the same error. Looks like a bug with the iCloud shared album - so I'll ask the other family member to re-share it to me and see if that works, if not, then I will check the source image properties in that shared album in case there's a bug with Meural's support for different file formats.
If I log in to the my.meural.netgear.com portal from my MacBook Pro using Safari, I can upload any number of photos (I tried 200) from that same iCloud shared album without error. However, the photo meta data is not upload and all the titles are replaced by a useless hex string unique to each photo, like this 1D62FC13-D242-4576-B86A-621F48C269D1. I will have to delete them all and re-upload when the bug has been fixed.
So two bugs: (1) the Meural app on iPhone cannot add from 'some' iCloud shared albums despite all image formats being heic. (2) the work around for adding photos using the Safari browser does not upload the photo meta data.
Interim update: iOS 15.6.1 has not made any difference, which isn't a surprise as that update was for security vulnerabilities. I installed Chrome on the iPad and it gives the same results as Safari in the Meural web portal - uploads are fine from an iCloud shared album but it still loses the photo data and changes the title to an unfriendly hex string. Meural app still fails to upload any photo from a shared iCloud album (containing recently taken photos) giving an error that relates to the image's header.
I still cannot link a number of shared iCloud albums after the update to iOS 16.1 - I was hoping Photos would have had some bug fixes. Meural app still the version from a few months ago. I cannot determine why some other shared iCloud albums from the same sharer and their same phone work fine. Same photo format just more recently taken. Not Live Photos and no videos in the album, but the photos may have originally been Live Photos prior to them being edited. I have tried re subscribing to the shared album, deleting it in the Meural app etc. and a manual upload of a single photo from that share album gives a format error.
If the photos are JPEG then it works. If Apple HEIF and after a variant of iOS 15 (not sure which but mid last year), then the linked album is empty and cannot be synced. It goes through the download process and progress bar in Meural app but the linked album never refreshes and remains empty.
if I create a shared album in iCloud, add photos that are JPEG and HEIF, then create a linked album in Meural to this iCloud shared album, only the JPEG's sync up to Meural. Yet I can manually add those HEIF photos to a playlist.
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