Can you point to a statement by Apple where they said they were going to allow merging of Apple IDs? And, at least with Apple, you have someone to call! Reason? So I hunted down the email Id received from Apple with my case number, clicked it to reopen the case, and decided to try the chat since I didnt want to have a long conversation. That jives with what I found too 18 hours was a long time, but far less than it would have taken for a fresh upload. But ever since Sierra that simple information has become inaccessible thanks to Apple making logging and Console so fancy (oh no, but in theory its the proper way to do it) that it doesnt serve the simplest of purposes anymore. I only use iTunes to manage my music (which it used to do better than it does now but let that pass) and to manage my iOS 'ecosystem'. I then set up a new email address and assigned it as my new Apple ID by using the Apple ID web site. In the end, it took less (possibly much less, since it finished while I was sleeping) than 18 hours to re-upload 113 GB over a 6 Mbps upstream link. Later, Steve sent me a link to a couple of pages that explained the situation. When I get the chance, will investigate, but this is the latest in a string of issues (e.g. Every time I clicked Continue to acknowledge that I realized this fact, Photos turned iCloud Photo Library off again. I love macOS for the most part, but avoid everything Apple does in the cloud. Works for me. If you really wanted to specify exactly what photos appear on each device, you'd need to fall back to iTunes. All my photos are stored on my Macs. Since it seems like you have access to a Mac, I'd start the process from the Mac (a different user account) and then join the iCloud Photo Library from the iOS devices, after which you can stop using the Mac. They were good explanations, but Ill award another Bad Apple! for Apple pawning the task of describing expected behavior off on a user tip, rather than providing official documentation. There's no harm in putting photos in iCloud as long as you also have Download Originals to this Mac enabled on a computer that also backs up to local storage. However, theres a nasty side effect of turning iCloud off and back on: iCloud Photo Library needs to re-upload all your photos. About the higher photo upload count, I wonder if it counts the Burst photos while the Photos app might only count the 1 selected photo, resulting in the discrepancy. Every week youll get tech tips, in-depth reviews, and insightful news analysis for discerning Apple users. That said, I still don't feel confident about it. Apparently Apple *really* doesn't like >1 display. The 'backup to some Mac"-option is philosophically wrong: it should be clear that that Mac is the reference. Took me like a week. I have exactly the same setup as Mark: "A" is iCloud, syncing Contacts, Calendars, Notes, Messages, etc. Cook shouldn't be fooled: although Apple's "Services" business is growing, the quality of said Services is WAY, WAY behind its competitors; its growth is due to customer lock-in, NOT MERIT. To add to the list of actions that requires the entire Photos library to be re-uploaded to iCloud: changing your Apple ID. Ive had to re-upload my 300+ GB Photos Library as well. Once iCloud family sharing came out, I upgraded and turned on iCloud Photo Library for my wifes iMac, which wasnt using it previously. Thanks Adam. I hoped there wouldnt be an additional charge for the 24 hours I was on the 2 TB plan, but I didnt think Id know that for a month. Calendar: The calendar block for "Today" is highlighted by having a colored circle behind the date. Not a lot of money, certainly, but it is simply wrong for Apple to charge a customer to resolve a problem caused by bad design and expected behavior.. No, my Bad Apple is definitely iTunes. The latter flummoxes me completely. So we turned it off, and gave up. Upgrade to the 2 TB storage plan and downgrade later. Why should Photos say at one point that my library is 113.03 GB, and then 94.6 GB at another? Anecdotal, yet. I think the iCloud Photo Library still won't recognise my photo albums or any imported photographs, but I'll gladly report back if that works. I use keywords all the time, what do you think is missing? Verbose error-reporting for trivial occurrences (see the "Month 13" errors recently) drowns the logs to the detriment of any clarity. If you have to choose one of the two, I think manual makes sense for Photos. 
The ensuing conversation spiraled off in numerous directions as various friends and family members griped, kibitzed, and tried to solve each others problems. One month it added over $1000 to my internet bill. r/iCloud is a 100% community-driven subreddit. Simple as that. That's a bold statement. Private email from people saying that they have either stopped using iCloud Photo Library or won't use because of this sort of behavior. I didn't know there were iCloud Photo Library differences between versions of macOS, but I'm not entirely surprised. But this, along with a few other items in Photos is downright scary and a Bad Apple! If it involves the cloud, Apple struggles with it. Shea Marie thought the problem was the family sharing storage that Tonya and Tristan use, and that it would catch up shortly. Just make sure to have Download Originals enabled on at least one Mac that backs up locally. Calendar sucks. Ouch, that's awful! When I contacted Apple for a refund on my 2TB upgrade (which was also only 24 hours), they sent me around the houses and were completely unhelpful on the phone before finally sorting it. I still use it, but I have multiple backups. Rob, according to the the High Sierra info on Apple.com/macos/how-to-upgrade/ all MacBooks (Pro's and Air's) from late 2009 on and all Mac mini's from mid 2010 are compatible with High Sierra. father-in-law yesterday. Dropbox doesnt. Don't take these complaints with iCloud Photo Library to mean that you shouldn't use it. :-) The only argument I can see for why this is true is that there's nothing you can do with a day, so it doesn't make much sense to select it. Tried to debug it many many times and I couldn't, so what I just did was import all of those photos onto my laptop and then manually upload into iCloud via the web browser. I also have had trouble in slow uploading to the iCloud. Apple confirmed they cannot consolidate my two x Apple IDs. ", said I, "I'll just pop your iPhoto/Photo library up onto iCloud and it will sync to both your iPhone and iPad and you'll never need to go need a desktop machine again. It doesn't appear in any feeds, and anyone with a direct link to it will see a message like this one. It does this in order to compare the librarys contents to the synchronization truth at iCloud. If I'm going to move stuff, it seems like I should make "B" my primary ID and have it sync w/iCloud, but, frankly, tackling that scares me thinking about all the data I could lose in the process! 
In the article, when comparing iCloud Photo Library with Google Photos (privacy implications & uploading aside), one should try resetting their library with Google to find out how hard they make it. I've searched the web and there appears to be many and varied methods to try to fix this issue. For over 31 years, weve published professional, member-supported tech journalism that makes you smarter. I should be able to set up smart groups on my Mac & have them show up on my phone. 3. That was necessary, but I had no idea it would involve 2.5 hours of work with Apple and 18 hours of re-uploading at least I dont have a data cap or per-byte charges, as do some TidBITS readers! Is it iCloud or is it my iMac? Weirdly it doesn't happen in the Mac Photos app, only in the iOS app. Events went away with iPhoto; you just have albums now. After another hour of support, I was back to where I was before I turned iCloud off and back on. My Bad Apple is iTunes tout court. Great new column, Adam! That might be the problem. I agree that Apple has never done a really good job with cloud services, but I do cut them a little slack because they're operating at a scale above any company except perhaps Google and Microsoft. However, if I click on any other day, there is **NO** visible indication as to what day is selected. Its not as seemless as iCloud Photo Library claims to offer, but at least it works and I remain in control of whats going on. We are years from when they first started destroying the Photos interface, and literally destroying people's photos. Yeah, multiple Apple IDs are a disaster, but to be fair, no other large company I know (Google, Facebook, etc) lets you do that either. So to sum up, a wide variety of common actions can create a situation where the recommended solution is to sign up for an unnecessary storage plan and then cancel it later? As I said in the article, I think you're right. Reuse governed by Creative Commons License. To reverse the charges, she had to cancel my iCloud storage entirely, causing me to receive an alarming email and notification from iCloud that my free 5 GB of storage was full. That's why some basic macOS behaviours are not supported. And love the idea of proffering solutions. It was fascinating because many of these people were long-time Mac users who had been blindsided by an interface change along We dont see that sort of poor performance with Dropbox or Google Drive, and this behavior is both unnecessary and driving people away I'm not quite sure what you mean by borderless scrolling, and I don't remember what it was like before High Sierra because Calendar has always sucked and I've refused to use it since BusyCal came out. This seems to work for most. I do have a complaint about Fotos/Photos: it is incomprehensible for me how to manage to distribute my photos between iMac/iPhone/iPad. Nothing has worked and Apple support told me to restore my phone, but that didn't work either. Until High Sierra, you could use iCloud for photos *and* sync photos from other libraries (Aperture in my case) to your devices. Don't even get me started on how many stupid design decisions there are in Photos. Uninformative statistics, the confusing distinction between backing up and synchronising (when I click 'synchronize' the status window says it is 'backing up' for some moment). I see the same behavior when I export an older image: a status message will say "downloading image." I have a suggestion for Bad Apple: the iOS 11 user interface for 'Choose Artists For You' in Apple Music. I didn't need to upgrade my plan to (eventually) fix it however. I'll have to pay attention and see if I can figure out what causes it. (That went well with mDNSreponder -> Discoveryd---ugh!). So iCloud Photo Library wouldn't sync over your VPN? I definitely have some burst photos, though I guess I'd be surprised if there were nearly 1000 of them. Has anyone had success with such a scenario? Dropbox syncs intelligently; why can't Apple? I've never seen that. So I had to turn it off and lost thousands of photos from my phone. (in fact thanks to the old MkConsole app I was displaying those logs right on my desktop). my wife's Photos library is ~400GB for ~100K photos and i-can't-recall-how-many-videos. ), but Photos in general gives me the pip, and gives Apple computer/software a bad reputation among ordinary users. I wonder what the hypothetical attack it's protecting against is. Press J to jump to the feed. It turns out that there are quite a few actions that can cause your entire Photos library to be re-uploaded to iCloud, one of which I knew already (see More Problems with iCloud Photo Library Uploads, 19 June 2015): Im not convinced that these actions actually re-upload everything, since it goes faster than my initial iCloud Photo Library upload. Thoughtful, detailed coverage of everything Apple for 32 years, #1619: Stage Manager first impressions, Live Text in Preview redux, SMS 2FA failure fix, moving large folders with ChronoSync, #1618: M2 MacBook Air available to order, Lockdown Mode, Live Text vs. Several weeks later, including multiple Apple Support phone calls and emails, a 2TB upgrade, a downgrade with unexpected charges that required multiple escalated calls to get reversed which caused the account resetwhew! This applies to iCloud as well. You might try blowing away the library on your MacBook (since it won't have anything unique in it anyway) and letting Photos download a fresh copy of everything from iCloud Photo Library. from iCloud Photo Library. My iCloud problems were entirely unrelated to iCloud Photo Library, and were in fact solved by a quick toggle off/on. It's part and parcel with getting new versions of Photos only with new versions of macOS, I think. Seven years, he said. No worries, I'll stump up for the 200Gb package and put us both on "Family Sharing". I moved my library, set Photos.app preferences to use iCloud Photo Library and Optimise Mac Storage, and THEN selected Download Originals to this Mac. So my wife no longer uses a desktop Mac. ), but nothing worked and Photos remained "Uploading 3 items" for a week. All that was true, except for the fact that the reason my iCloud account was so full was because it already held every one of those photos! It summarized my iCloud storage situation and seemingly let me delete data from iCloud. Instead I still rely on the good old Photo Stream. Didnt expect my goddamn Photo Library needing to re-uploaded because of that. Precisely! So far, after about a year of testing Photos and having my Library in iCloud I have learned to trust it. For instance, why are the options for Apples apps in iOSs Settings app not organized alphabetically? The only setting to tweak that behavior is Optimize Storage, which you can use so the smaller devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air) don't download the original images, but just smaller thumbnails. i think i know this pain better than many. What versions of IOS (and Macos) is being used? That's odd I wonder why it would have cared?
This not how it should work though! (Not all are when using Photo Stream). It's mind-numbingly obtuse. After I walked through the steps to upgrade my iCloud storage account to 2 TB, I was presented with an interesting dialog I hadnt seen before. Just my experience. 2. A clean install may be the way to go and then add back your in-law's data, presuming they're backed up. I used to say a typical high school student could do the job, but with more & more computer courses in lower grades, there are probably junior high or even upper elementary students that can do it. co-incidentally, this happened to my 81y.o. One Photos issue I have seen recently is older photos suddenly appearing at the top of the "All Photos" album on the phones. Because, we were told by Apple Support, that my wifes iMac is still on Yosemite or whatever and that doesnt work with iCloud Photo Library. Have no idea why this happens. "Easy! Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it. So any advice for someone getting serious about turning on iCloud Photo Library, with a 70GB photo library? I presume this is the sort of thing that is really, really hard at the backend because of the scale of what Apple does, along with security and privacy issues (there are probably a lot of John Smiths out there who could get merged incorrectly or maliciously). Disappointing, but obvious. I had 4000 photos in the unable to upload album. However, I can not upload any new pictures as well. Apple never told him that upgrading is 2011 laptop and 2013 Mac Mini to High Sierra would make those computers unusable). YMMV. Right now a bunch of pics from 2015 burped up and are annoying us. TidBITS is copyright 2022 TidBITS Publishing Inc. Why is drag and drop so completely broken to most apps? I was gonna say Contacts are ok, but I seem to have lost many of the notes on my contacts! Oh, I am right now trying to get my iPadMini4 up and going again after trying to change the way my few hundred photos are shared. For a great many of us, bandwidth is constrained and use is charged. I like it a lot, and it's exactly what I thought Apple should have done with iPhoto many years ago. It's about sharing data between your personal Apple devices, and for the most part, it works pretty well for that. 3. photos and videos together never results in a number higher than 31,471. Im on a metered connection so I carefully watch data transferred and in every case so far where it said it was re-loading, it was actually just doing a validation. It always appears on the primary display. Apple ID management is a black art.
It's not just you. I don't want every device to show the same content. After waiting on hold for a while, I had to explain the situation to another woman and wait on hold again before finally being escalated again to a senior advisor, Shea Marie. I included your post in https://old.reddit.com/r/iphonehelp/comments/sh68b7/who_else_is_experiencing_icloud_unable_to_upload/. Thus, I will need to make future purchases (to share) on "A" instead of "B" and swap between them as updates occur. But it wont work. I will try that strategy. I seem to also recall Apple at one time in the past promising such to "government types" (might have been in relation to the Copyright exemptions for Fair Use). It didnt right away, but after the call, when I went into System Preferences > iCloud > Manage Family > My Apps & Services > iCloud Storage, it was clear that I needed to click Start Sharing again to get the storage to share properly. I have numerous albums from Aperture that I like to keep on my iPhone and iPad. Bugs the hell out of everyone, but there must be good reasons for it, perhaps related to security. Apple has never been able to do "cloud" stuff right. Thanks, that's what I hoped to hear. Take a look at this thread. Ive done this this several times for various reasons (reflecting more my desire to poke around than issues with Photos) and my experience is that the message is a worst case. It should be really simple??!! address these problems. How do I delete a photo from every device and how do I delete it from just one? :-). Turn off the sync and turn on. I finally gave up and decided to store my photos entirely on my local Computers, giving out the use of iCloud for storing photos.
The ensuing conversation spiraled off in numerous directions as various friends and family members griped, kibitzed, and tried to solve each others problems. One month it added over $1000 to my internet bill. r/iCloud is a 100% community-driven subreddit. Simple as that. That's a bold statement. Private email from people saying that they have either stopped using iCloud Photo Library or won't use because of this sort of behavior. I didn't know there were iCloud Photo Library differences between versions of macOS, but I'm not entirely surprised. But this, along with a few other items in Photos is downright scary and a Bad Apple! If it involves the cloud, Apple struggles with it. Shea Marie thought the problem was the family sharing storage that Tonya and Tristan use, and that it would catch up shortly. Just make sure to have Download Originals enabled on at least one Mac that backs up locally. Calendar sucks. Ouch, that's awful! When I contacted Apple for a refund on my 2TB upgrade (which was also only 24 hours), they sent me around the houses and were completely unhelpful on the phone before finally sorting it. I still use it, but I have multiple backups. Rob, according to the the High Sierra info on Apple.com/macos/how-to-upgrade/ all MacBooks (Pro's and Air's) from late 2009 on and all Mac mini's from mid 2010 are compatible with High Sierra. father-in-law yesterday. Dropbox doesnt. Don't take these complaints with iCloud Photo Library to mean that you shouldn't use it. :-) The only argument I can see for why this is true is that there's nothing you can do with a day, so it doesn't make much sense to select it. Tried to debug it many many times and I couldn't, so what I just did was import all of those photos onto my laptop and then manually upload into iCloud via the web browser. I also have had trouble in slow uploading to the iCloud. Apple confirmed they cannot consolidate my two x Apple IDs. ", said I, "I'll just pop your iPhoto/Photo library up onto iCloud and it will sync to both your iPhone and iPad and you'll never need to go need a desktop machine again. It doesn't appear in any feeds, and anyone with a direct link to it will see a message like this one. It does this in order to compare the librarys contents to the synchronization truth at iCloud. If I'm going to move stuff, it seems like I should make "B" my primary ID and have it sync w/iCloud, but, frankly, tackling that scares me thinking about all the data I could lose in the process! In the article, when comparing iCloud Photo Library with Google Photos (privacy implications & uploading aside), one should try resetting their library with Google to find out how hard they make it. I've searched the web and there appears to be many and varied methods to try to fix this issue. For over 31 years, weve published professional, member-supported tech journalism that makes you smarter. I should be able to set up smart groups on my Mac & have them show up on my phone. 3. That was necessary, but I had no idea it would involve 2.5 hours of work with Apple and 18 hours of re-uploading at least I dont have a data cap or per-byte charges, as do some TidBITS readers! Is it iCloud or is it my iMac? Weirdly it doesn't happen in the Mac Photos app, only in the iOS app. Events went away with iPhoto; you just have albums now. After another hour of support, I was back to where I was before I turned iCloud off and back on. My Bad Apple is iTunes tout court. Great new column, Adam! That might be the problem. I agree that Apple has never done a really good job with cloud services, but I do cut them a little slack because they're operating at a scale above any company except perhaps Google and Microsoft. However, if I click on any other day, there is **NO** visible indication as to what day is selected. Its not as seemless as iCloud Photo Library claims to offer, but at least it works and I remain in control of whats going on. We are years from when they first started destroying the Photos interface, and literally destroying people's photos. Yeah, multiple Apple IDs are a disaster, but to be fair, no other large company I know (Google, Facebook, etc) lets you do that either. So to sum up, a wide variety of common actions can create a situation where the recommended solution is to sign up for an unnecessary storage plan and then cancel it later? As I said in the article, I think you're right. Reuse governed by Creative Commons License. To reverse the charges, she had to cancel my iCloud storage entirely, causing me to receive an alarming email and notification from iCloud that my free 5 GB of storage was full. That's why some basic macOS behaviours are not supported. And love the idea of proffering solutions. It was fascinating because many of these people were long-time Mac users who had been blindsided by an interface change along We dont see that sort of poor performance with Dropbox or Google Drive, and this behavior is both unnecessary and driving people away I'm not quite sure what you mean by borderless scrolling, and I don't remember what it was like before High Sierra because Calendar has always sucked and I've refused to use it since BusyCal came out. This seems to work for most. I do have a complaint about Fotos/Photos: it is incomprehensible for me how to manage to distribute my photos between iMac/iPhone/iPad. Nothing has worked and Apple support told me to restore my phone, but that didn't work either. Until High Sierra, you could use iCloud for photos *and* sync photos from other libraries (Aperture in my case) to your devices. Don't even get me started on how many stupid design decisions there are in Photos. Uninformative statistics, the confusing distinction between backing up and synchronising (when I click 'synchronize' the status window says it is 'backing up' for some moment). I see the same behavior when I export an older image: a status message will say "downloading image." I have a suggestion for Bad Apple: the iOS 11 user interface for 'Choose Artists For You' in Apple Music. I didn't need to upgrade my plan to (eventually) fix it however. I'll have to pay attention and see if I can figure out what causes it. (That went well with mDNSreponder -> Discoveryd---ugh!). So iCloud Photo Library wouldn't sync over your VPN? I definitely have some burst photos, though I guess I'd be surprised if there were nearly 1000 of them. Has anyone had success with such a scenario? Dropbox syncs intelligently; why can't Apple? I've never seen that. So I had to turn it off and lost thousands of photos from my phone. (in fact thanks to the old MkConsole app I was displaying those logs right on my desktop). my wife's Photos library is ~400GB for ~100K photos and i-can't-recall-how-many-videos. ), but Photos in general gives me the pip, and gives Apple computer/software a bad reputation among ordinary users. I wonder what the hypothetical attack it's protecting against is. Press J to jump to the feed. It turns out that there are quite a few actions that can cause your entire Photos library to be re-uploaded to iCloud, one of which I knew already (see More Problems with iCloud Photo Library Uploads, 19 June 2015): Im not convinced that these actions actually re-upload everything, since it goes faster than my initial iCloud Photo Library upload. Thoughtful, detailed coverage of everything Apple for 32 years, #1619: Stage Manager first impressions, Live Text in Preview redux, SMS 2FA failure fix, moving large folders with ChronoSync, #1618: M2 MacBook Air available to order, Lockdown Mode, Live Text vs. Several weeks later, including multiple Apple Support phone calls and emails, a 2TB upgrade, a downgrade with unexpected charges that required multiple escalated calls to get reversed which caused the account resetwhew! This applies to iCloud as well. You might try blowing away the library on your MacBook (since it won't have anything unique in it anyway) and letting Photos download a fresh copy of everything from iCloud Photo Library. from iCloud Photo Library. My iCloud problems were entirely unrelated to iCloud Photo Library, and were in fact solved by a quick toggle off/on. It's part and parcel with getting new versions of Photos only with new versions of macOS, I think. Seven years, he said. No worries, I'll stump up for the 200Gb package and put us both on "Family Sharing". I moved my library, set Photos.app preferences to use iCloud Photo Library and Optimise Mac Storage, and THEN selected Download Originals to this Mac. So my wife no longer uses a desktop Mac. ), but nothing worked and Photos remained "Uploading 3 items" for a week. All that was true, except for the fact that the reason my iCloud account was so full was because it already held every one of those photos! It summarized my iCloud storage situation and seemingly let me delete data from iCloud. Instead I still rely on the good old Photo Stream. Didnt expect my goddamn Photo Library needing to re-uploaded because of that. Precisely! So far, after about a year of testing Photos and having my Library in iCloud I have learned to trust it. For instance, why are the options for Apples apps in iOSs Settings app not organized alphabetically? The only setting to tweak that behavior is Optimize Storage, which you can use so the smaller devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air) don't download the original images, but just smaller thumbnails. i think i know this pain better than many. What versions of IOS (and Macos) is being used? That's odd I wonder why it would have cared?
This not how it should work though! (Not all are when using Photo Stream). It's mind-numbingly obtuse. After I walked through the steps to upgrade my iCloud storage account to 2 TB, I was presented with an interesting dialog I hadnt seen before. Just my experience. 2. A clean install may be the way to go and then add back your in-law's data, presuming they're backed up. I used to say a typical high school student could do the job, but with more & more computer courses in lower grades, there are probably junior high or even upper elementary students that can do it. co-incidentally, this happened to my 81y.o. One Photos issue I have seen recently is older photos suddenly appearing at the top of the "All Photos" album on the phones. Because, we were told by Apple Support, that my wifes iMac is still on Yosemite or whatever and that doesnt work with iCloud Photo Library. Have no idea why this happens. "Easy! Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it. So any advice for someone getting serious about turning on iCloud Photo Library, with a 70GB photo library? I presume this is the sort of thing that is really, really hard at the backend because of the scale of what Apple does, along with security and privacy issues (there are probably a lot of John Smiths out there who could get merged incorrectly or maliciously). Disappointing, but obvious. I had 4000 photos in the unable to upload album. However, I can not upload any new pictures as well. Apple never told him that upgrading is 2011 laptop and 2013 Mac Mini to High Sierra would make those computers unusable). YMMV. Right now a bunch of pics from 2015 burped up and are annoying us. TidBITS is copyright 2022 TidBITS Publishing Inc. Why is drag and drop so completely broken to most apps? I was gonna say Contacts are ok, but I seem to have lost many of the notes on my contacts! Oh, I am right now trying to get my iPadMini4 up and going again after trying to change the way my few hundred photos are shared. For a great many of us, bandwidth is constrained and use is charged. I like it a lot, and it's exactly what I thought Apple should have done with iPhoto many years ago. It's about sharing data between your personal Apple devices, and for the most part, it works pretty well for that. 3. photos and videos together never results in a number higher than 31,471. Im on a metered connection so I carefully watch data transferred and in every case so far where it said it was re-loading, it was actually just doing a validation. It always appears on the primary display. Apple ID management is a black art.
It's not just you. I don't want every device to show the same content. After waiting on hold for a while, I had to explain the situation to another woman and wait on hold again before finally being escalated again to a senior advisor, Shea Marie. I included your post in https://old.reddit.com/r/iphonehelp/comments/sh68b7/who_else_is_experiencing_icloud_unable_to_upload/. Thus, I will need to make future purchases (to share) on "A" instead of "B" and swap between them as updates occur. But it wont work. I will try that strategy. I seem to also recall Apple at one time in the past promising such to "government types" (might have been in relation to the Copyright exemptions for Fair Use). It didnt right away, but after the call, when I went into System Preferences > iCloud > Manage Family > My Apps & Services > iCloud Storage, it was clear that I needed to click Start Sharing again to get the storage to share properly. I have numerous albums from Aperture that I like to keep on my iPhone and iPad. Bugs the hell out of everyone, but there must be good reasons for it, perhaps related to security. Apple has never been able to do "cloud" stuff right. Thanks, that's what I hoped to hear. Take a look at this thread. Ive done this this several times for various reasons (reflecting more my desire to poke around than issues with Photos) and my experience is that the message is a worst case. It should be really simple??!! address these problems. How do I delete a photo from every device and how do I delete it from just one? :-). Turn off the sync and turn on. I finally gave up and decided to store my photos entirely on my local Computers, giving out the use of iCloud for storing photos.