At home, I absolutely love my Macbook Pro Retina 15" that I got in late 2014. I made the switch from Windows to OS X in late 2012 first with a Mac Mini. While it was a fantastic computer, I decided to switch and I love having the laptop.
I held off on moving to Yosemite for a bit for two major reasons. Yosemite was having some major networking issues that I knew would be crippling for me using home Wifi. There were tons of purported fixes that didn't really address the issue. It sounds like the true fix will be coming in 10.10.4 when Apple abandons their new discoveryd process. (More on that here: http://fortune.com/2015/05/27/apple-mac-bug/ and countless other places).
The other big stumbling block was the iPhoto to Photos move. My primary use for my home computer is organization of an extensive digital photo collection. It is one of my favorite hobbies. Over many years, I have scanned all of the print photos in my family that I could fine (that number is roughly 4,000). Throw in a plethora of digital pictures, and duplicates as I preserve originals for edited and improved versions, and today I have over 28,000 pictures! In iPhoto, they are meticulously organized with correct dates, faces and keywords. With a few quick clicks or searches, I can put my hands on any photo. They scroll across my screen daily as my screensaver to be enjoyed. They are not relegated to a dark box in the corner of a closet.
One of the added bonuses of doing this in the Apple ecosystem was having this complete photo access on my iPhone and iPad. I have both devices with 64GB of storage, and that was ample space to synchronize my photos. Events and Faces also synchronized for easy access on those devices as well. That required me to plug in and synchronize with iTunes regularly, but in doing so, my photos were always at my fingertips.
So, now we have Photos and the iCloud Photo Stream. By using this software and this ecosystem, now, all my photos will automatically synchronize to all devices with no efforts required by me. Great, right? Yes, but it's not that simple.
iCloud gives users 5GB by default. Before even messing with iCloud Photo Stream, I was paying for 20GB per year. That was enough space to back up my iPhone and iPad as I needed just over 5GB. I want to say the current rates for that were somewhere in the neighborhood of $10-20/year.
But now I'm looking at 28k photos! Yikes. When I enabled iCloud Photo Stream, it let me know that 200GB would be enough space. They charge $3.99/mo for that. I decided that full, no effort access to my photos was worth that and upgraded.
But now what? My MBP needs to upload all these pictures! And, here we go...
I have a great Internet connection. I love Wide Open West and we pay for 50Mbps down with 5Mbps up. But, Photos just began to push all of my pictures up. It consumed the 5Mbps upload rate. And brought my whole household's Internet to a crawl in the process.
It is painfully short sighted of Apple to not give more control on the upload process. The only control you have is whether or not you keep high quality original resolution on your local device, and an option to pause uploads for a day.
Researching the matter quickly let me know I was not alone. Many people with similarly large photo collections and similarly crushed Internet connections. Thankfully I have found a decent solution here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6992427?start=90&tstart=0
A post from user 'mayall' on page 7 highlights the fix. By using an Apple Developer tool known as the Network Link Conditioner, you can control your bandwidth usage.
Sign into http://developer.apple.com with your Apple ID. You'll need to accept a few license agreements and whatnot. Then make your way to downloads and get the latest Xcode developer toolset as a DMG download (v 6.3.2 as of this writing on 6/4/2015).
Once you have the Network Link Conditioner installed, it is an option in your System Preferences. Use the Manage Profiles button in the lower right. Add a Custom Profile, a name that suits you, and configure the downlink and uplink bandwidth in Mbps. With my 50/5 Internet connection, I have configured a 20/2 profile. I am now running this way. This means my MBP will limit its Internet usage to 20Mbps down and 2Mbps up. That is leaving 30Mbps down and 3Mbps up for all the other devices in my home, so everyone else can happily use the Internet.
It's been about 5 days so far. My Internet connection is working well and the photos are uploading. Out of 28k photos, 18k have gone up so far with 10k to go.
P.S. I am also looking at Google Photos and wondering if I'll need to keep paying for iCloud space. In the meantime, I will upload them all and decide which one I like best.
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