Just a comment on this: I have the Apple One family plan with 2 TB storage, and I just checked - I am able to buy another 2 TB if I wanted to (for an additional $10/month). So you can have at least 4 TB with a family plan. (Not that you may want to spend that much - but it is possible.)
Yes I had read about this but I recall there were some complications and potential “gotchas”. I’d rather Apple just offer a higher plan straight up. OR else make it easier to selectively decide which photos I want in iCloud… but this is getting off topic I suppose. Thanks for posting your experience tho.
Honestly don’t understand where you are coming from, sorry! If you don’t use iCloud Photos, you can use albums and a Finder-based approach to load subsets of your images onto your phone if you want to have access to those images directly and make them available for these features.
Many people don’t pay for more iCloud storage, but use their iPhone as their primary camera, so it works for them, too. It’s hard being an outlier, I know (as does Adam, even more so).
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That’s pretty much what I do. I don’t use iCloud photos for a variety of reasons. I use Photos to offload-and-delete everything I shoot with my phone and my standalone camera. So my Mac has the master copy of everything and the phone (and camera) have only what I shot since my last offload.
I then have a few smart albums defined which select all still pictures of myself, my family and my cats. When I sync my phone (via USB and the Finder), I have it configured to sync these smart albums, plus all events in the last 6 months, plus a few hand-curated albums (e.g. my wallpaper images).
This lets me carry around the pictures I’m most likely to show others, leaving the rest on my Mac. And nobody’s cloud servers are involved.
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Again, this is getting way off topic from the original, but since you brought it up… you say you “use Photos to offload everything you shoot with your iPhone” Do you make edits on your iPhone? Do you notice that when you use Photos to “import” from iPhone, a not-insignificant amount of those edits are “lost”? I had previously written this off as my fault for not being on the latest macOS on my Mac “photo repository”. However even when I brought everything up to the very latest OS versions, I still see the problem. I have pointed this out to other who claim they never had the problem, only to later take a much closer look and find that under scrutiny, yes they can find many imported photos that appear to be missing some of the edits that were made while on the iPhone. On the other hand, people who are syncing dynamically to iCloud Photos do not have this problem (since there is no “import”). To me this feels like a bug in how Apple is handling photo imports from iPhone on the Mac, the photo formats and “sidecar” files, etc. And it also feels like something Apple doesn’t care much about since the switch to promoting iCloud Photos as the preferred method. This is why I get just a little annoyed when I see anything related to Apple’s handling of photos being touted as bringing “Recurring Joy” LOL.
I rarely, if ever make edits on the phone. When I do, it is typically just to crop an image prior to sending it elsewhere (Messages, e-mail, AirDrop), and most of the time, I delete these pictures after sending them.
For pictures that I intend to keep, I don’t edit on the phone. I prefer to get them into the computer as unmodified as possible, where I can edit them on a big screen and use more powerful tools (e.g. Photoshop Elements) for edits that go beyond simple things like cropping and rotating.
Just got a question on Mastodon: how can you access the photo on your lock screen with the shuffle feature?
- While viewing photo on the Lock Screen, press and hold.
- Tap Customize.
- Tap the Lock Screen image (at left).
- Tap the More (…) button at the lower-right corner.
- Tap Show Photo in Library.
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Sadly that didn’t work for me :( It just gave me the options for removing it from the series, or changing the frequency of the shuffle. I’d sure love to know!
Diane
I’m missing the top option. I’m one of the people who doesn’t see multiple shuffle options too so I suspect it’s all part of the same bug. Too bad as I’m looking for one of my shuffle pix and can’t find it.
You’re missing it because it’s a new feature in iOS 16.2. Once you update, it will be there.
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Adam you rock! Thanks for reminding me, I wanted to update today before Apple’s servers get overloaded from xmas :)
Will keep you posted!
Diane
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Oh, I had no idea—I figured I’d missed it earlier! Shows me that I need to read all TidBITS articles with a fine-toothed comb.
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Glenn, you’re not the only one! Color me embarrassed.
Diane
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ps - it worked after the update!! The fact that I can’t pick anything other than Nature isn’t fixed, but now I can find the 20 random pix it rotates on the lock screen. Thanks!
Diane
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When I attempt to customize the Lock Screen on my XR, I get then Shuffle Categories screen with 4 options: People, Pets, Nature, and Cities. But only one person is offered for selection. My on-phone photo library now contains 8 different people, with a variety of photos containing faces of each of them. But the Shuffle feature only finds one of them.
At the bottom of the Photos/Albums/People page, there’s a message that the iPhone is “Updating People… To finish updating your People, lock your phone and connect it to power”. That message has been there for months.
You might need to call Apple support. It sounds like something is stuck, and I’m not sure of the best way to trigger Photos to clear the problem.
I still don’t get the options, I’m stuck on Nature. I’ve kind of given up on it - luckily I take a lot of nature pix!
Diane
Apple Support was not helpful. I got the stock response: ‘Is your iPhone up-to-date?’
At the time, it was not. I had 16.1, and there had been a subsequent update I had not yet installed. So after getting off the call and ensuring I had a current backup, I updated.
That made no difference. Nor did the update to 16.2, nor 16.3, nor 16.3.1.
I get the Shuffle Categories screen with the 4 options (unlike @dianed143 ), but the People option only offers a single person, even though the Photos app has found and classified pictures of 8 different friends and family.
Hello
Love this feature. Is there any way to include photo location in the screen saver? Old phots are so great but I want to know where they were taken.