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.
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.
> 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|8 years ago
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|8 years ago
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.
zeusk|8 years ago
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.