Back in May I posted a Twitter rant about how iCloud Photos was fucking up videos I shot on my phone after upgrading to iOS 12.3. I’m happy to report that hasn’t happened again. But now I’m running into this…
Every two months I upload a bunch of photos to Shutterfly and mail physical prints of my kids to my 95 year-old grandmother – their great-grandmother. The Shutterfly app for iOS makes this very easy. Just select the photos from your library, wait a few minutes for them to upload, and then tap on my grandmother’s saved mailing address and hit send. The whole process takes about five minutes and it brings her a whole lotta joy.
The issue I’m running into is that I’m only able to choose photos from my library. Because I’m doing this on my phone and because Apple doesn’t understand that families might want to see each other’s photos, I can’t pick any pictures my wife may have taken of our kids.
But, as I’ve written about, all of the photos we both take are stored in Google Photos. Great. So today I went to Google Photos, selected about sixty of the best shots, and downloaded them to my Mac.
The next obvious step? Upload those to Shutterfly and ship them off to my grandmother.
Except that Shutterfly’s website uploader doesn’t work in Safari. Like everyone else doing “modern” web development these days, I’m sure they’re only testing in Chrome. Fine.
No big deal. I’ll just import the photos into an album in Photos.app on my Mac, which will then sync to my iPhone, and then I can use the Shutterfly app.
And here’s where Apple’s latest Photos.app fuckery comes into play…
That’s right. I dragged photos from Finder into an empty album in Photos.app and watched as they were imported and then subsequently deleted.
I did this five times with the same result before I finally thought to record the whole fiasco for posterity. No matter whether I dragged from Finder or used the “Import…” menu item – same thing. I even checked the special “Imports” album in the Photos.app sidebar, which shows the most recent group of photos you’ve imported. Nope. Not there either.
Look. It’s not all bad news. iCloud’s shared photo streams? Those are rock-solid and amazing. Our family and friends hardly ever post to Facebook or Instagram anymore. We almost exclusively share through Apple’s shared albums. And like someone recently remarked on Twitter, the photos/videos we share get way more meaningful engagement (likes + comments) from our close circle of friends and family than they ever did via Facebook.
But jesus fucking christ, Apple. Have you really gone so all-in on “iOS is the future” that you’ve abandoned Mac Q/A? Is there anyone on the executive team that actually uses a Mac as their daily driver? I get the feeling that the only reason iCloud shared albums work as well as they do is because they happen to also be a major feature of iOS. But Photos.app on Mac? Or Messages.app on Mac? Pffft. Fuck that. iPad OS is going to have multiple windows soon. Who needs a Mac?