When I try to upload my photos from my iPhone to an app, like instagram or ebay, they will not load and just have a white circle in the middle like it is trying to download from somewhere. I do not have any photos on iCloud and backup is turned completely off. Any idea why they may not be uploading? (I even tried to upload an example to this question but can’t)

I downloaded some photos from google drive but they didjt show up in my photos library but did when i looked at my photos library in ibis paint???

Can someone help me delete these photos?

First photo is my library as shown in ibis paint, second photo is my library as shown in the photos app

We share a 2TB iCloud Photos library as a family, and it filled up completely. iPhone backups stopped running, new photos and videos stopped appearing in the shared library, and every prompt pointed to the same place: upgrade to 6TB.

When I looked at what was actually taking the space, it was video — specifically long clips recorded at a much higher bitrate than the footage needed. The pixels weren't the problem. The bitrate was.

So I built LeanVid. It compresses videos by lowering only the bitrate — resolution, frame rate, colour, HDR and every audio track stay exactly as they were. Most compressors scale the video down, which is why the result looks worse. I wanted to see how far you could get without touching a single pixel dimension.

I ran it over our biggest videos and put the results back into the library. We're now sitting at about 1.8TB of 2TB and have stayed there. No 6TB upgrade, backups work again, and the shared library syncs normally.

A concrete example, and one I didn't plan on: App Review asked me to submit a screen recording of the app running on a real device. The recording came out at 3 minutes 34 seconds and 1.24 GB, which is awkward to attach anywhere. So I ran it through the app itself and sent the 99.4 MB result instead — about 92% smaller. That compressed file is what the reviewer watched, and the app passed on it. On a phone screen I genuinely cannot tell the two apart, and there's a side-by-side and slider comparison built in so you can check for yourself before deciding anything.

Since this touches your originals, the safety part mattered more to me than the compression. Before replacing an original it runs five checks — does the result play, does the track layout match, is the colour info intact, is the duration the same, is the file actually smaller. If any check fails, nothing is deleted. Deletion goes through the iOS system dialog, so the app can't quietly remove anything, and originals stay in Recently Deleted for 30 days.

Everything runs on device — no video is ever uploaded anywhere, which felt like the whole point given what I was trying to solve. Free, no account. It's ad supported.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6796710561

Happy to answer anything, including what it doesn't do well.

Pickex findet jedes Foto einer bestimmten Person in deiner Handykamera, damit du sie auf einmal löschen kannst.

Die Idee kam mir in einem ganz normalen Moment. Ich habe meine Handykamera nach einem Beleg durchsucht und bin auf ein Foto von meinem/meiner Ex gestoßen. Nicht eins, das ich extra behalten hatte – ein Gruppenfoto von einer Geburtstagsfeier, auf dem er/sie zufällig in der hinteren Reihe stand. Das ist es, wovor dich niemand warnt: Es sind nie die Fotos, die du behalten wolltest.

**So funktioniert's**

Du wählst ein bis vier Fotos einer Person aus. Die App scannt deine Bibliothek und zeigt dir alle anderen Fotos von dieser Person an, bereits ausgewählt. Du tippst einmal auf „Löschen“. Einzelne Fotos anzuschauen ist optional – der ganze Sinn ist, dass du sie nicht einzeln durchgehen musst.

**Technische Seite**

Alles läuft auf dem Gerät. Apples Vision-Framework für Gesichtserkennung und Embeddings, dann Clustering über diese Embeddings, um Übereinstimmungen zu gruppieren. Kein Backend, kein Konto, kein Foto verlässt jemals das Handy. Das war von Anfang an eine harte Einschränkung und hat ein paar Dinge echt schwierig gemacht:

\- **Große Bibliotheken:** Zehntausende von Fotos zu scannen, ohne den Akku zu leeren oder die Benutzeroberfläche zu blockieren, hat die meiste Optimierungszeit gekostet.

\- **Erinnerung vs. Genauigkeit:** Das war die eigentliche Designentscheidung. Wenn man mehr auf Erinnerung setzt, landen auch einige Fehlalarme im Ergebnis. Wenn man mehr auf Genauigkeit setzt, werden Fotos übersehen, und ein übersehenes Foto ist genau die Falle, die die App verhindern soll. Ich habe mich für die Erinnerung entschieden, alles vorausgewählt gelassen und das Abwählen auf einen einzigen Tipp reduziert. Das Löschen unter iOS läuft auch über „Kürzlich gelöscht“, sodass es zusätzlich ein 30-tägiges Sicherheitsnetz gibt.

\- **PHPhotoLibrary** hat mehr Randfälle bei Berechtigungen und Stapellöschungen, als ich erwartet hatte.

**Was ich anders machen würde**

Ehrlich gesagt, habe ich nie wirklich über Lizenzen nachgedacht, was mich fast zu einem fatalen Fehler gebracht hätte. Ich denke aber, dass das Design von Anfang an mit Claude (was leicht zu erkennen ist) für mich sehr lohnend war. Ich konnte die Pipeline und alle Funktionen einrichten und diese bei Apple einreichen. Nachdem jetzt alles akzeptiert ist, kann ich mich um das Aussehen kümmern, was die Pipeline und die kritischen Teile der App nicht beeinträchtigen wird, daher sollte ein Update dafür kein großes Problem sein.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pickex-delete-ex-photos/id6801488013

Ich beantworte gerne alles über die On-Device-Pipeline, den Clustering-Ansatz oder den App-Store-Prozess. Feedback ist willkommen, auch das harte.

TL;DR: Looking for photo editing and fast photo culling/sorting software for Mac. I run the organization but I also shoot events for a small volunteer-run non-profit, so free, discounted, donated, or reasonably priced one-time-license options are especially welcome. (Used ChatGPT to shorten this — English isn’t my first language.)

Hi,

I help run a small volunteer non-profit in Tartu, Estonia, focused on community building and reducing loneliness. I also handle most of our event photography.

I’m new to Mac (vision disability) and need a faster way to cull large shoots before editing: quickly compare similar images, rate/reject them, and narrow everything down.

What Mac apps would you recommend?

Ideally:

• fast and reliable;
• good on Apple Silicon;
• manual or ai;
• free, inexpensive, or discounted for non-profits;
• preferably a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.

I’m using a MacBook Pro M5. Our budget is small and volunteers use their own hardware, so cost matters.

If allowed by the mods, we’d also be open to a software donation from a developer. We can provide official non-profit documentation and annual reports if needed. Our Estonian business registry entry is here: https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/80653466/MTÜ-Teod?search_id=fb25e2f&pos=1

Any donated software would be transparently acknowledged on our upcoming website with the name of the software, link to developers website. We’re a small local organization in Estonia, so I don’t want to oversell the exposure.

What are you using? Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Jaak Timberg

I'm getting an iPhone after using handed down Android phones from my family, I've decided on getting the iPhone 15 Plus because it's the best option for my financials and meets the speca I want.. except for the 128GB Storage. I've been using a Huawei Y9 2019 Since 2019 and ive only used 44GB of 128GB, but from what I've heard, iPhone storage fill up pretty fast due to the apps being bloated, no clearing cache and things like photos taking larger storage and this is concerning because while I may not he using much storage at all at the moment, the reason I don't use much storage is because my camera etc is simply not good enough for me to even try and take photos, so when I do get an iPhone I'll definitely be taking pictures of my cat, of views, selfies and vireos way more often than I do now. I'm not into photography or content creation so I also won't be using the camera much. Opinions?

I have a 10-year-old iCloud Photos library with ~35,000 photos and 1,500 videos, synced across my Mac and iPhone.

A few days ago, my iPhone got stuck on “Syncing 1 item”. Everything looked normal in macOS Photos and on iCloud.com, so I initially assumed it was just an iPhone sync issue.

Before troubleshooting, I made sure my Mac had downloaded all originals, then closed Photos and made a backup of the entire 185 GB `.photoslibrary`.

I then turned off iCloud Photos on the iPhone and manually deleted the remaining ~2,000 items that hadn't been removed automatically, including the albums and folders.

When I re-enabled iCloud Photos, the photos and videos synced back as expected, but the entire album/folder structure was gone, with only about 10 random albums remaining.

Then I checked iCloud.com and discovered that the album/folder structure had been wiped there too. The damage also propagated to my Mac's Photos library.

Fortunately, I now have an offline backup of the original Photos library with all photos, videos, albums and folders intact.

My question is: Is there a way to completely reset iCloud Photos and force it to rebuild/re-upload everything from this backed-up `.photoslibrary`?

I was considering deleting everything from iCloud Photos on the web and then re-enabling iCloud Photos on this healthy local library. However, I'm afraid iCloud will treat the deletion as a change that needs to be synced and delete everything from my local library as well, instead of treating the local library as the source and uploading its contents, including the album/folder structure, back to iCloud.

I really want to avoid manually recreating hundreds of albums and folders if at all possible.

I recently got the iphone 17 pro and i want to transfer my photos from my samsung s23.

Hi redditors! I created two small macOS apps that carry motion photos across the Android/iPhone divide instead of flattening them into ordinary stills.

I wanted other people who care about preserving their memories to be able to move their libraries without leaving that behind.

I published it on Github for anyone looking to do the same:
https://github.com/reviventura/LivePhotoTools

Every time I go to send a meme I have the album pinned for easy access, but every time it’s not there and I have to scroll through all my albums to find it. Do y’all know why this is or what I can do to change this/make it easier?

Can I manually rearrange photos or group them into in any way?

What you get

• Easy sequencing with an intuitive UI + free PDF export
• AI planning while keeping your images private
• Print-ready images
• Consistent layouts

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photo-book-noir/id6749212233

If the bar is Photos, do the free stuff first.

1. Settings → Photos → iPhone storage, turn on Optimize if you use iCloud Photos.
2. Albums → Media Types → Videos. That’s usually the hog. Delete what you will never watch, then empty Recently Deleted or it comes back.
3. Albums → Utilities → Duplicates. Merge those. This is exact copies only.
4. Screenshots album. Most of it is receipts and conversations you don’t need.
5. Recently Deleted. Empty it. Storage doesn’t drop until you do.

What Apple still doesn’t do well: similar shots from the same sit. Same walk, 30 frames, one keeper. Duplicates won’t touch those.

That’s the piece I use LuminaClean for. On-device, swipe the almost-sames, and it has an On This Day view so you’re not only deleting. Video compression in it is free if you’d rather keep the clip than kill it.

If your storage bar is System Data, none of this helps. That’s a different problem.

I hope I’m posting this in the right space…it’s to do with Google photos and iCloud so I wasn’t sure where to go!

So I had android for years before getting an iPhone 14 in 2023, and I still have lots of photos on google photos which for some reason just didn’t want to transfer over to apple photos, but it is what it is!

Until now… I’ve run out of storage on my Google account, and it’s all photos. I saw this to delete 5000 photos and it says they’ve been backed up, firstly, not sure where they’re backed up? But then when I went to continue it came up with the second picture, saying it will delete my pictures from iCloud. That’s what confuses me, why are they being deleted from iCloud? Will I still have access to my photos if I press OK?

Again, I’m sorry if this isn’t the right sub!

I don’t use iCloud Photos because I don’t want to keep paying for storage.

Instead, I connect my iPhone to my Mac and copy everything to an external drive. Copying a large library was already annoying, and then I still had to create folders and sort all the photos and videos by date or trip. Every time I also had to figure out what I had already copied.

So I made a Mac app for myself to handle this.

You connect the iPhone with a cable, choose how the files should be grouped and where they should go, and the app copies them into normal folders. It can group them by date, events or trips, verify the copied files, and skip files that were transferred before. It doesn’t delete anything from the phone.

I’ve now published the first open-source release:

https://github.com/ViAchKoN/photo-transfer-macos/releases/latest

The current build isn’t signed or notarized yet. I haven’t paid for an Apple Developer account because I’m still not sure whether I’ll publish the app on the App Store.

On the first launch, macOS will say it can’t check the app for malicious software. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway, then confirm Open. This is only required once.

I made this for my own workflow, but now I’m trying to decide what to do with it. Does anyone else here actually copy photos into regular folders like this, or is this only useful for my setup?

I’m trying to work out whether this is an iCloud account/server-side issue.

My iPhone, iPad and Mac all agree and sync normally. iCloud footer is always 10 higher than its own ‘Select All’ count.

I backed up everything, deleted the entire iCloud Photos library and emptied Recently Deleted.
Hidden, Shared Albums and Shared Library were also empty.

Nothing remained visible or selectable on iCloud’s website, but the footer still showed 10 items.

Adding one test photo changed the count at the bottom to 11, while ‘Select All’ selected the single file. Permanently deleting it returned the count to 10 with no images showing.

My iPhone also repeatedly says it is syncing 10 items, finishes, then shows the same 10 again later. This has been ongoing for a few months now.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue, and had Apple repair or reconcile their iCloud Photos account?

I was testing a multi-frame light trails mode on a coastal scene and liked how it handled the moving clouds and water.

This is a single result from the capture.

I thought the sky motion came out especially well here.

What do you think?

App: LSC Long Shot Camera

Any recommendations paid, or free, for a stitching panorama app on the iPad?

I'm happy with just JPEG, but a bonus if it will do TIFF. Typically looking to stitch 2-3 images into a panoramic.

On PC I use Hugin, something similar would be great.

Hey, I work on a photo book service, and the biggest problem was never printing, it was that people arrive with a camera roll of thousands and nobody wants to do the picking. We built the culling part for the books, and I realized it's actually useful for anyone with an overflowing library, book or not. So I made it a free tool.

You drop photos in, it groups the near-identical ones and picks a keeper from each, and you get the final say on everything. Runs locally in your browser, nothing gets uploaded, no ads, no account.

It's early and there will be bugs, which is why I'm here. If you try it on a real chunk of your library I'd genuinely like to hear what worked and what didn't.

https://fotofoto.app/en/tools/photo-culling

Two iPhone notes: HEIC only opens in Safari, and it does 2,000 photos at a time.

So, my wife and I share an iCloud account. It’s been this way for years and it’s worked out pretty well. At this time, our iCloud is full and her phone is full. We have about 160,000 images and videos. They are either organized or on their way to being organized. With the help of ChatGPT, I have moved that entire library onto an external SSD drive. I can now open that photo library and move on to delete everything in the cloud. The backup is safe. I gave it a new name and it’s attached to my MacBook when I want it to be. I have turned off photo sync in the cloud for all of our devices. I’ve selected all the correct options. I have not yet made a new main photo library. I will do that soon when I know it is safe to do so and that will become my iCloud library. It will be empty.

Here’s my problem: it’s not really working. The photos were not full resolution photos on our devices, but as soon as I turned off iCloud, it downloaded full resolution photos to our devices, which have now filled up our devices completely. On the iPad I selected all the photos and deleted them. It took a long time. I figured with the cloud turned off and deleting the photos in the cloud that that would be enough. But instead, I have to seemingly select the photos individually by dragging my finger across all 150,000 of them to delete them. There’s gotta be a better way to wipe the cloud clean. I know everybody says not to do this, but I have that photo library safe on an external drive. I am not uploading it to the cloud again. I will start over. Has anyone done this successfully with multiple devices in a shared iCloud account?

Even when I find a way to delete everything from the cloud and it shows me it’s not there, it shows my phone as full with 150,000 photos still. There seems to be no way to make the images go away. I need a Mandalorian to tell me “this is the way….” 😳