14 DAY TRIAL // Last month, Apple debuted a web service called iCloud Photo Library and enabled every iCloud account holder to upload their photos to the cloud on any device and have them synced across all of them.
Everything looked and worked fine (for the most part) when the service went online about a week ago. We noticed some issues with PNGs not uploading but we didn’t think much of it. Now, however, it seems completely non-usable.
“Upload Failed”
iCloud Photo Library is in beta, mind you. This is not an attempt to slam Apple’s cloud-based photo syncing service in any way, but even so we’re surprised it no longer takes “orders.”
A week ago, when we tried to upload a bunch of different photos, the service selectively accepted some and denied others. Sometimes it was the format, other times it was the file size, and yet more negative occurrences could be observed later in our testing, including classic server outages.
However, in the week that has passed since we first started using iCloud Photo Library, the service has proved more and more unreliable with each day. As of now, the web-based interface over at iCloud.com will not take a single photo upload, regardless of file size, format, or the device it was created on.
Beta? More like Alpha
Apple has made a habit of releasing crippled beta services to the public in the past few years, something that didn’t happen too often during Steve Jobs’ tenure at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California. Granted, Apple was more focused on hardware than on software back then, but the difference is visible.
iWork, Siri, Maps, and now iCloud Photos are all beta services that incurred major issues during public testing. The problems with Apple’s iCloud services are particularly concerning because server-side glitches can end up in loss of data. Sure, Apple does its bit and warns the user to back up before doing anything, but as it stands right now, iCloud Photo Library doesn’t behave like a beta. It behaves like an Alpha.
Apple’s System Status page makes no mentioning of any issues involving Photos or any other service that has roots in iCloud. This is also none too surprising, as the company rarely ever acknowledges any iCloud problems in due time.
Along with this article, we’d like to dispense a piece of advice to our readers: despite being a promising service in terms of features, iCloud Photo Library is highly unreliable right now. Don’t erase anything before you’ve made sure that the upload has been successful. In fact, as a precaution, keep a spare copy of everything you upload to iCloud Photo Library until the bugs are ironed out.
